It Was Just an Accident

Editor's Note: Last year at TIFF I stumbled upon some amazing videos from a Torontonian about the films in the programme, and this year, I met that Torontonian in person - everyone, say hi to Frankie Maranger! She managed to catch a few different films at TIFF that we weren't able to - and I think you'll love her style! Enjoy!

Fans of the website “Does the Dog Die?” beware: the dog dies. Very early on. But I hope that this doesn’t dissuade you from watching writer/director Jafar Panahi’s latest feature, It Was Just an Accident, which took home the Palme d’Or this year at Cannes and will be a contender for France’s shortlist of films to be considered in the upcoming Oscars race for Best International Feature. And– if there is any sort of justice in the Academy– should also be a contender for Best Feature (avid readers of Obscurae know that this awards season is going to be a tight race for many categories this year!)

In 2010, Jafar Panahi was imprisoned in Iran and convicted of “propaganda against the regime” for filming a documentary about civil unrest following the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison and barred for twenty years from writing, directing, or making films, from appearing in the media, and from traveling outside of Iran.

While under house arrest in 2011, Panahi managed to smuggle his documentary This is Not a Film out of Iran via flash drive, which screened at Cannes and New York Film Festival that year. Panahi appealed his conviction and was denied but he was not forced to serve more time in prison.

Panahi was arrested again in July of 2022 after showing up to the prosecutor’s office to inquire about another filmmaker who had recently been detained. Panahi served nearly seven months and was finally released after going on a 48-hour hunger strike in protest of his arrest. Although the Iranian government has upheld Panahi’s ban to create films, he has continued to make them over the years and It Was Just an Accident might be his best work yet.

It Was Just an Accident is cleverly packaged as a revenge thriller but there is much more going on beneath the thrills of the plot, which was influenced by Panahi’s time in prison and the treatment that he received by the prison guards (check out Panahi’s first interview with the media in over 15 years in the Guardian [May 2025] where he explains more about his detainment and films).

It Was Just an Accident follows a man named Vahid (Vahid Mobasheri) who stumbles upon Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), whom Vahid believes- but cannot identify with full conviction– to be the man who tortured him in prison. As Vahid tries to confirm whether or not Eghbal was his prison guard, he– along with other previously imprisoned people whom Vahid meets along the way– become entangled in the ultimate moral quandary as they try to figure out what to do with their (maybe) torturer.

Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident is more than your run-of-the-mill thriller; it is a tour de force look at the underbelly of corruption in Iran, from its prison system to its hospitals. And, it’s my number one film of the year.