It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi, 2025)

We have ways of making you talk

Give Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi this much credit: he shoots what he sees. Intrigued by the look on a young girl's face, he made The Mirror (1997), about a child acting in a film production and the sudden plot twists she introduces in both the film and her life. Seeing how women are treated in Iran, he made The Circle (2000), a series of interlinked stories about different women, and Offside (2006), about a group of young women determined to see the World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain-- even if women are banned from attending. 

The Circle, Offside, and the crime drama Crimson Gold (2003) helped earn Panahi a 6-year prison sentence and 20-year filmmaking ban; he responded with This Is Not A Film (2011), and the surreptitiously shot Taxi (2015). He was arrested and imprisoned again in 2022 for following up on the arrest of a fellow filmmaker, and his response is this film-- about former prisoners and how they react when meeting their former prison interrogator.   

The above hugely incomplete sketch suggests Panahi's life would make an excellent political thriller; truth is likely less dramatic. His six-year prison sentence was commuted to house arrest a year and seven months later, and the house arrest commuted to a travel ban preventing him from leaving Iran; the second prison term lasted some seven months till he went on a hunger strike and the publicity from that strike forced authorities to release him 48 hours later. Each time he did something provocative and the regime responded he-- or his friends abroad-- managed to put enough pressure on the government to have him release or his sentence reduced; that said, he continues to provoke, and continues to fall into trouble (with this latest picture the government has sentenced him to a year in prison and a travel ban in absentia).

There's an accusation that ever since the government has stepped up their persecution Panahi's filmmaking has become "self-indulgent." I'm not sure; This is Not a Film is in part a documentary showing the severe limits imposed on Panahi's life at that moment, but also-- taking cue from the Magrittelike title-- suggests a self-mocking investigation into what does or does not constitute filmmaking; Taxi is basically a single locked-down camera conducting on-the-spot interviews of various people traveling by taxi in and about Tehran, but the dashboard cam also suggests the kind of video surveillance used to record subversives and gather incriminating evidence. There's a bit of play to Panahi's politically outspoken work, maybe even I daresay art; if it's actually any good is for the viewer to decide (I like em, for the record). 

Major tactic Panahi uses for It Was Just an Accident is to tell the story as a comedy; one can imagine Costa-Gavras telling something similar as heavy drama. Here we have garage mechanic Vahid  (Vahid Mobasseri) who after many years hears an unforgettable sound: the squeaky prosthetic leg of one 'Peg Leg' Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), his one-time torturer, walking into his garage. Acting on impulse Vahid knocks Eghbal out (the one implausible moment in the film-- surely someone on the street would see a man drive a van up to a pedestrian to tap his skull with a shovel?) and ends up crisscrossing the city, asking various acquaintances to 1) help confirm he really is Eghbal and 2) deal with him once they confirm his identity. 

Panahi isn't explicit, at least for the most part; you have to listen close to catch the throwaway details that suggest harrowing experiences. Shiva (Mariam Afshari) confirms Eghbal from his smell (which makes you ask: what went on between the two that she could recall a man years later from his smell?). Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr) has to feel up and down Eghbal's legs because he was blindfolded all the time. Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) admits she was tortured and it's never explicitly stated but you're almost sure (from the flood of words and tremor in her voice) that she was sexually assaulted-- and she has to admit this in front of her fiancee Ali (Majid Panahi). Each of them shudder and yell and have the kind of emotional outburst one sees in people who have undergone extreme trauma-- and the violence of the outbursts suggest we're not talking just sleep deprivation, or 24-hour heavy metal blasting through cell walls. 

Comes the point when the rest of the party abandon the quest, leaving only Vahid and Shiva with their captive; what follows is arguably the most intense twenty minutes captured onscreen in recent years, where the two-- with time running out and no one left but them to finish the job-- resort to the very same techniques Eghbal presumably used on them. Poetic justice, yes, but also a kind of validation of Eghbal's approach; you might say at this point Vahid and Shiva have lost and Eghbal, poor weeping Eghbal possibly sitting in a puddle of his own urine and begging for his life, has won. Panahi refuses to judge; he just lets what happens happen. And-- in a chilling coda involving Vahid and a certain memorable squeak-- further suggests that some things can never be resolved, or healed, or forgotten.  

Final note: interviewer Jean-Michel Frodon asked Panahi what if he can't return to Iran (he's appealing his current arrest order), and he said "...I can't do that. I don't have the courage! I'm unfit to live outside Iran." I can only wish I lack courage like that.