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Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who is considered one of the country’s greatest living film masters, is in Cannes with his latest film “It Was Just an Accident,” marking his first project since being incarcerated for several months in 2023 for criticizing the Iranian government.
In 2010, the auteur — known globally for prizewinning works such as “The Circle,” “Offside,” “This is Not a Film,” “Taxi” and most recently “No Bears” — was banned from making movies, speaking to the press and traveling, though he surreptitiously kept making them anyway. The ban was lifted in April 2023, and now Iranian authorities have allowed him to travel to Cannes to launch “It Was Just an Accident.”
In one of his first interviews since the 14-year ban was lifted, Panahi spoke to Variety through an interpreter about “It Was Just an Accident,” revealing how the drama — which centers around an outpouring of strong feelings by a group of former prisoners toward a torturous guard — stems from his incarceration. Pahani also expressed his desire for Iranians to see “It Was Just an Accident,” his first feature in which women do not wear the mandatory hijab, which he said reflects “the new reality of our society.”
To put it simply, your latest film talks about people who are very angry about how they were treated in jail. Is it just an accident that you made it after being jailed in Tehran’s Evin prison for political prisoners for several months?
When you spend eight hours a day blindfolded, seated in front of a wall, being interrogated by someone standing behind your back every day, you can’t stop wondering what kind of conversation you can have with this man. Out of these specific circumstances, what would be your relationship with such a human being if you meet them again? Not that I came up immediately with the idea of making a film out of it. It’s just a reflection, the kind of thought that you have while you are undergoing these specific circumstances in prison.
But that’s normal. As a filmmaker, you are always influenced by your environment, and when they take you out of your life and your society to lock you in a space like a prison, of course you come up with these reflections and ideas. But then [again] I didn’t mean to make a film out of it. Even when I was released, whenever I would walk or go by the prison, I asked myself: “What has happened to all these people who were with me, who are now on the other side of this wall? What are they up to? What are they going through these days while I’m out?” And so it was only gradually that all these reflections came together and gave me the idea of putting up this script and making a film out of it.
Is it fair to say that this film is an attempt at some kind of reconciliation?
It’s not about war and peace. It’s about the cycle of violence. We are social filmmakers, and as social filmmakers, we have no such thing as an absolute good character or an absolute bad character. Nobody is completely good or bad. Everybody is part of the system, and everybody is the outcome of a structure of a system that imposes its own rules and its own values on these people. So, the issue is more than reconciliation. It is a question of understanding how, when this system collapses, people who have been bombarded with medieval propaganda for nearly half a century can live together peacefully and express their needs and desires in an authentic way.
Of course, you shot this film, as has been the case in the past, without a permit. Was it more difficult to do that than before?
Well, my situation changed because the sentence — that had been running for over 16 years now, that banned me from filmmaking and even interviews and traveling — is now canceled. So officially, I’m like any other filmmaker who can undergo the process of censorship and ask for a permit to make a film. But of course, this is only the official aspect. In reality, given the subject that I wanted to deal with and the script that I had in mind, there was no way I could submit it to a commission and wait for their approval to make this film. So in reality, although the formal situation is different, for me it was exactly the same. I had to work in total secrecy, and again, do clandestine filmmaking with only my very close crew being aware of the subject of the film and of the content of the script. It was only my DP, my sound person and my actors. They were the only ones who really knew what we were going to work with, and that was the way we had to proceed all the way through.
I believe that this is the first time that you shot a film in which one of the characters is a woman who is not wearing a veil. Is that true? If so, tell me about the significance of that and why you chose to do that?
Well, this is the rule of Iranian cinema. It’s been the rule since the revolution. You are not allowed to show a woman’s hair. And because we had to put up with this rule, all of us were constantly trying to find solutions. And the first solution was not to give into this contradiction of showing women at home, where not even a religious woman would wear a scarf or a veil. And that’s the reason why I always made films that happened outside. Never in homes. Never interiors, so that we could justify the fact that they wore a veil according to the social rule.
So this is something that I have respected in all my films by showing women on the streets, in the countryside, outside, so that they wear a veil as they actually did in Iranian society. But then almost three years ago, there was this Woman, Life, Freedom movement after Mahsa Amini’s death, and this totally changed Iranian society. At the time we were in jail, so we couldn’t fully realize what was going on and what was the actual image, the transformed image, of Iranian society. I realized what really happened when I had a health problem and I insisted for weeks and weeks to be taken to a hospital. It was only after a few months that they finally accepted to transfer me to a hospital in a van.
And it was when I was crossing the city that all of a sudden I realized that Tehran had changed, because some women were just walking around with no veil. Most women had taken off their veils, and in spite of all the repression and all the conflicts that there had been on the subject, we could just see them walking freely with no veil on their head after four decades. And this was something totally new. Something that was the new reality of our society. And as I said [to myself] because we are social filmmakers, we depict the reality of our country. The reality of our society. So there was no way I could make a film and go on covering the female actresses, because that’s not what Iranian women – or many of them – are now doing. And this is why when I shot this film, I showed this character as she would have been in her real life.
And as a matter of fact, it was not just my actresses, it was also all the extras that you can see on the streets. We never asked them to put on a veil or to take off their veil. They were just as they were. And when we were shooting this bookshop scene, we were there and then some passers-by, they noticed us and they realized that we were making a film, and they recognized me. And as they were just talking on the street, I asked them, “Would you mind appearing as extras in the film?” And so the women said: “We don’t mind, but we will not wear a veil. If you ask us to wear a veil, we won’t do it.”
Do you feel that Iran’s authorities, by allowing you to travel, want to signal that they are being less repressive?
Well, I don’t think it’s really a decision with a specific meaning. I think I just did what my sentence required, which was that I was banned for 20 years. I did 15 years of it, 16 years of it, so I almost went through the [full] punishment that I was given. So I think even if you follow their legislation, they could not renew this sentence. It came to an end. But I don’t really see it as a sign of less repression or any openness. I think they are just putting up with their own laws as they go.
This is clearly a film that will not be able to have official distribution in Iran, as is always the case. However, when I was in Tehran a few years ago I went to the national museum of cinema and I found it interesting that there were posters of your films and prizes that you won in Cannes on display and that you were fully acknowledged as an important figure in Iranian cinema. When you make your films, do you consider the fact that they will be seen, albeit maybe not through the official channels? Are you making the film to speak to your own people?
As I said, we are social filmmakers. We get our inspiration from our society. Of course, the first spectators that we would like to have are our own compatriots, the Iranian viewers. And we really struggled with that. We even asked to have at least one specific theater where we could show our films for free, at least one place. But this was never made possible. This is how this regime has been running this country for decades now. They decide what you should say, what films should be made, what films should be shown, how you should get dressed, what you should eat. They decide about every aspect of your life.
This is the appearance that they impose on the Iranian people, but behind the curtain, the Iranians have not all submitted to these laws. They go on living their own lives with their own taste, with their own habits. And so of course, they discover our films as part of their lives, their social and cultural lives. And thank God, now we have all the new technologies and the virtual world that allows us to make this process very simple and quick, and reaching very quickly the Iranian audiences with our films. So even if it harms us economically, we don’t mind. We just want the Iranians to see our films, and we still wish we had at least one theater to show them. But even if we can’t, at least they can see them in illegal ways or in unofficial ways.
As for the museum that you were referring to, all the prizes, the awards that are there are related to the films that I shot before being imprisoned. Because when I was in jail, the interrogator was putting so much pressure on me for all these awards and the festivals and the recognition of my films. The first time that I saw my wife after that, I told her: “Go to the museum and get these awards back because now they are really problematic for me.” So now they are in my home.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
English (US) ·