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When “It Was Just an Accident,” a new movie from the Iranian director Jafar Panahi, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, on Saturday, Panahi responded in a way that I’ve never seen from a winning filmmaker. As the audience inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière erupted in applause and leaped to their feet, Panahi, in sunglasses, remained in his seat and crowed his elation to the skies. And then, with a smile of contentment, he folded his arms behind his head and leaned backward, as if to bask in the moment. Eventually, he rose and made his way to the stage, where Juliette Binoche, the president of the competition jury, and Cate Blanchett waited to present the award. No one seemed inclined to diminish the gravity of Panahi’s victory by hurrying him along. His long, anguished, and improbable journey to that stage merited more than a second’s reflection.
Panahi had last attended Cannes in 2003, for the première of his fourth feature, “Crimson Gold,” a tense, downbeat drama about a pizza-delivery man in Tehran pushed to a desperate criminal act. The film received strong reviews and won a major prize at Cannes; it also offered a stark assessment of the Islamic Republic, and was, unsurprisingly, banned from being shown in Iran. A similar fate had met Panahi’s previous film, “The Circle,” a trenchant critique of the everyday mistreatment of Iranian women, which won the top prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 2000. By the time he began making his next film, “Offside,” in 2005, Panahi was working in open defiance of the government. A thrilling comedy about young women blocked from attending a soccer match in Tehran, it was shot without ministry permission. After it won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival, in 2006, it was banned in Iran, though it was widely seen on unlicensed DVD copies and became one of Panahi’s most popular films.
In 2010, Iranian officials arrested Panahi and charged him with making anti-government propaganda; convicted, he was sentenced to six years in prison and given a twenty-year ban from making films. Neither punishment ultimately stuck. After a few months, the director was moved to house arrest, and he persisted in making movies: “This Is Not a Film” (2011), “Closed Curtain” (2014), “Taxi” (2015), “3 Faces” (2019), and “No Bears” (2022) were all shot clandestinely. “This Is Not a Film” was shot entirely inside his home; “Taxi” was largely filmed inside a cab. In years to come, these five films will be studied and appreciated not only as models of cinematic stealth and resourcefulness but also as a series of wry, even whimsical, self-portraits—a triumph of imaginative reflection under duress. In most of these movies, Panahi plays a director named Jafar Panahi, who is sometimes watchful and reticent, and sometimes vocally philosophical, openly interrogating the circumstances of his confinement. When I encountered these films at festivals, it was always a pleasure, and a comfort, to see their director onscreen, because he had also been banned from leaving Iran. It became customary, as a symbolic gesture of solidarity, for festival organizers to leave a seat empty for Panahi, with a placard bearing his name.
There was no such empty seat at Cannes this year. Panahi, no longer forbidden to travel, attended the première of “It Was Just an Accident,” a week ago, and he stayed in town through the closing ceremony, four days later. (He flew home, to Tehran, on Monday, without incident, and was greeted at the airport by cheering supporters.) His physical presence before adoring Cannes crowds—to say nothing of winning perhaps the most prestigious award in world cinema—was a stunning turnaround for a filmmaker who, just a few years earlier, had been languishing in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. He was sent there in 2022, after the authorities decided that he should serve his 2010 prison sentence after all. In February, 2023, Panahi protested his incarceration by beginning a hunger strike, which many feared would end in his death. Instead, forty-eight hours later, he was released—and freed, on his own brilliant, uncompromising terms, to make movies once more.
“It Was Just an Accident” is the first movie Panahi has directed since his release, and to say that it feels like a truly liberated piece of filmmaking seems both obvious and necessary: it’s the work of an artist who, having been to hell and back, has clearly run out of proverbial fucks to give. Panahi, notably, does not appear on camera, perhaps because it would have been redundant; his presence—and his experiences of detainment, imprisonment, interrogation—are stamped into every frame, and they confer on the film an implacable moral authority. The story begins with the accident of the title: a man named Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), driving home with his wife and young daughter at night, fatally strikes a dog with his car. The immediate aftermath triggers the first of several shifts in tone and focus: suddenly, we are following another character, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who works at a garage where Eghbal goes for help. Vahid was once imprisoned and tortured for protesting for workers’ rights, and he believes that he recognizes Eghbal as a dark figure from his time in prison, someone he has excellent reason to wish dead.
But even as Vahid takes bold, drastic action—he knocks Eghbal out, ties him up, and stashes him in the back of a van—he cannot be entirely sure if he has the right man. Before long, other survivors, all of whom share both Vahid’s rage and his uncertainty, are drawn into the fray, and the van fills with an ever more unruly and bickersome human cargo. Moving vehicles have framed the drama of many an Iranian art-house classic since Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry”—incidentally, the last film from that country to win the Palme, in 1997—but few of them have shifted into such high dramatic gear, or careened so determinedly between thriller and farce.
Although Panahi shot “It Was Just an Accident” in secret, the obliquity and circumspection of his methods in other recent films are little in evidence here. More than any of his films since “Crimson Gold,” “It Was Just an Accident” has the urgency of a thriller, albeit one in which suspense is, for a while, predicated on indecision. It is, bluntly and unabashedly, rip-roaring entertainment, propelled by flurries of comedy, bursts of emotion, and sidelong jolts of social critique. One dry running gag finds poor Vahid called on to bribe workers, from security guards to hospital nurses: all cynical participants in a system that never stops exacting a toll, big or small, one way or another.
At the heart of the film are individual memories of the unspeakable, life-altering agony that Vahid and his companions suffered—experiences that, in light of Panahi’s own persecution, take on a devastating personal significance. In some of the films that he made between 2011 and 2022, Panahi embraced a sly intellectual gamesmanship, evincing a curiosity and playfulness that pushed against the boundaries of cinematic form, and our perceptions of fiction and reality. In the astonishing “No Bears,” he seemed to express a pessimism about the cinematic medium itself, and questioned whether the movies, so prone to manipulate and mislead, had exhausted their ability to tell the truth.
“It Was Just an Accident,” by bracing contrast, has no interest in speaking in code: this is Panahi at his most direct, his most engrossing, and his most furiously political. Cinema, manipulative or not, still has its uses, and Panahi summons all the medium’s expressive powers to deliver a fierce, unambiguous denunciation of authoritarian regimes the world over. Startlingly, though, he issues an even graver warning to those who, given an opportunity to exact some small measure of justice, would hesitate or lose their nerve. Your tormentors will show you no mercy, he seems to be saying, and deserve no mercy in return.
The sight of Juliette Binoche embracing Jafar Panahi on the Lumière stage had a particular full-circle poignancy. In 2010, at a Cannes press conference for Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy,” in which Binoche starred, a journalist had asked a question about Panahi and the dire circumstances of his recent imprisonment, and she had wept openly in response. Her display of emotion made headlines; so did her appearance at the festival’s closing ceremony days later, when, accepting the Best Actress award for “Certified Copy,” she held up Panahi’s nameplate at the podium and called for his release.
Binoche spoke out again at this year’s opening ceremony, where she delivered a sombre tribute to Fatma Hassona, a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian photojournalist who was killed, along with ten members of her family, by an Israeli air strike in Gaza on April 16th. Hassona is the central subject of “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” a haunting documentary from the Iranian director Sepideh Farsi, which premièred in acid, a sidebar program. Hassona died the day after it was announced that the film would be at Cannes. “Fatma should have been with us tonight,” Binoche said. Later, at the film’s first screening, Farsi said that Israeli forces had deliberately targeted Hassona in the attack. (The Israel Defence Forces has said that a Hamas operative was the target.)
In the film, Hassona says, with shattering calm, that she expects to be killed soon, and that she can only hope her death will have meaning and impact. That explains both her participation in Farsi’s film and the risks she takes in her work, continuing to shoot photographs of the death and devastation around her. Farsi includes several of those images in the film, which is otherwise largely structured around a series of video conversations with Hassona, which Farsi began filming in April, 2024. Hassona’s words are not easy to hear, not only because of the horrors and deprivations she describes but also, more literally, because of the circumstances of the interviews. Her video and audio frequently cut in and out, a decent internet connection being one of many things she has learned to do without. She appears on the screen of Farsi’s phone, while Farsi shakily films the testimony with another phone. This technical rawness serves a crucial purpose; as the film progresses, our distance from Hassona becomes ever more apparent and profound.
Hassona talks about feeling hungry all the time, and the difficulties of finding food and water. She says that nowhere in Gaza is safe, and that she dreams of being able to leave one day. She introduces the director to friends and family members, and describes the many relatives she has lost in recent months; at one point, she angles her phone toward a window, so that Farsi can see smoke rising from a nearby explosion. The movie’s title, “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” is Hassona’s description of the brave mind-set that she must enter, simply to leave her home and step out into the street. For all this, she remains irrepressibly, even radiantly high-spirited, and takes a palpable joy and gratitude in Farsi’s virtual company. Asked how she feels to still be living in Gaza, Hassona replies, “I feel proud,” and there’s defiance in her smile. “They can’t defeat us.”
The difficulty of speaking truth to power is never a distant theme at Cannes, but this year the cinema of anti-authoritarian courage took many forms. In the competition, Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident” was joined by other dark dramas of political resistance, including “Two Prosecutors,” the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s bleak, absorbing portrait of an idealistic young Soviet lawyer who, in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s terror, bravely and foolishly sets out to right a moral wrong. And then there was the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s generously entertaining “The Secret Agent”—not a spy thriller in any conventional sense but a film that draws us, with consummate skill, into a murky web of nineteen-seventies political intrigue. As a story of a man being targeted by Brazil’s military dictatorship, this exuberant, multilayered fiction can be thought of as a companion piece—and a superior one—to last year’s Oscar-winning “I’m Still Here.”
The theme extended to one of the strongest movies I saw outside the main competition, “My Father’s Shadow,” a gorgeously filmed first feature from the British-born Nigerian filmmaker Akinola Davies, Jr. Hailed as the first Nigerian film ever to play in the festival’s Official Selection, it received a special mention from the jury that bestows the Caméra d’Or, the award for the festival’s best début. It’s easy to see why the jurors were so moved. “My Father’s Shadow” takes place almost entirely on June 12, 1993, the day of a historic Nigerian Presidential election that would have brought an end to a decade of military rule, had the results not then been nullified. Davies, drawing on childhood experience, frames this turbulent moment through the eyes and ears of two young brothers, Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) and Akin (Godwin Egbo), who live with their mother in a remote village. On June 12th, they receive a surprise visit from their father, Folarin (an exceptional Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù), whom they rarely see, and who impulsively decides to bring them for the day to Lagos, where he lives and works.
“My Father’s Shadow” is, in part, about the intoxication of surfaces: Davies immerses us and his child protagonists in the dazzling hustle and bustle of Lagos, and he frames Folarin as a presence both overwhelming and elusive—a citadel of masculinity whom the boys, though in awe of his magnetism, can already feel slipping away. The movie is structured around Folarin’s various errands and encounters, each of them revealing; there are setbacks at work, hints of another woman in his life, and clues that he may be involved in politics himself. But as election turmoil escalates in the streets, the film leads us serenely coastward, where Folarin and his sons splash about, talk, and enjoy a fleeting idyll that you will remember, afterward, as something sacred. “My Father’s Shadow” is a wise, stirring chronicle of personal and political disillusionment, touched by a gorgeous grace. It insists that, when the world seems to be collapsing, an act of love can be its own powerful form of resistance. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
