Time and again, Jafar Panahi’s films accomplish the extraordinary: you will feel enriched and changed, thanks to the deep reserves of humanism in his movies since his delicate 1995 debut, The White Balloon. If you engage with his later filmography, starting with 2011’s unclassifiable This Is Not a Film — the first movie the Iranian director made in secrecy after his 2010 prison sentence and 20-year filmmaking and travel ban — you might even rethink your preconceived notions about cinema: what it is and what it can be.
By putting his name to masterwork after masterwork despite the unthinkable constraints to which he’s been subjected — and still is, given his recent enraging sentencing just last month — it turns out that Panahi didn’t only trick his repressive government. He also did a number on the movies themselves, revolutionizing their language when he had to reinvent the rules of the game, be it behind the wheel of a taxi, or sitting on his couch with a pet iguana on his shoulder.
Panahi pours all the spiritual wisdom, political anger, narrative patience, and visual finesse he’s garnered into his latest stunner, It Was Just an Accident — of course, made entirely in secret.
A Palme d’Or winner in Cannes, the movie follows an unlikely band of five Tehranis as they try to decide whether the man they have kidnapped for revenge is indeed the same person who once tortured them in prison. In charting their journey, Panahi’s lens is layered with stories, and closely observant of human behavior in moments desperate, sometimes frightening, and often absurdly funny. He is elegiac about the present, but also cautiously hopeful in his gaze toward the future, cherishing births, marital unions, new dawns. He orchestrates claustrophobia and fear expertly, while making room for gentle optimism when revenge takes a backseat.
But above all, he makes no compromises on human dignity, right through to his haunting endnote, propelled by the year’s smartest sound design. It is, after all, the same dignity that has come to define Panahi’s filmmaking resilience.