Iranian director Jafar Panahi has made extraordinary films despite hostility from his country’s Islamist authorities who have at various times put him behind bars, banned him from international travel, and issued prohibitions against him making any more movies.
His latest narrative feature, It Was Just an Accident (Un Simple Accident), won the Palme d’or in Cannes and just held its Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It’s the story of a warehouse worker, Vahid, who was formerly incarcerated and tortured by authorities for protesting unpaid wages. One evening at the warehouse, he unexpectedly encounters a man he believes to have been his torturer – a man named Eghbal who uses a prosthetic leg that squeaks when he walks.
Vahid abducts Eghbal, but after becoming uncertain whether indeed the man was his torturer, he seeks help making a positive identification from other people tortured in prison by the same chilling figure they called “Pegleg.”
“It is a simple story with a common pain,” Panahi explained as he came by Deadline’s Toronto Studio. “It’s a pain that has been there and has bothered them for some time and it becomes an excuse for a conversation, a conversation about what is about to happen.”
Tension mounts as the story unfolds, yet it contains comedic moments.
“Sometimes when our pains are mixed with humor, they become more tolerable and perhaps seeing them is easier for the audience,” Panahi said, speaking through an interpreter. “The truth is that humor is in our culture, it’s embedded in it, and we don’t have to force it to enter a film or a story… It also entered the story by itself.”
The detainees in the film had been blindfolded during their imprisonment, making them acutely sensitive to sound. The squeaking of Pegleg’s prosthetic limb remains a haunting and even terrifying memory.
“When you go under interrogation inside prison,” Panahi observed, “and when you’re placed in front of a wall within half a meter and you’re blindfolded with the interrogator right behind you, who is constantly asking questions, when you have to lift your blindfold a little bit up to be able to write down the answers, what you are focusing on the most is your sense of hearing. It is the auditory sense that allows you to think about who this person is, what this person might look like, and what he might be wearing that day. You keep wanting to imagine him and understand him based on his voice. Therefore, the details of his voice stay with you and you always think, what am I going to do if I recognize this voice one day?”
‘It Was Just An Accident’
Neon
Vahid and those he enlists in the effort to positively identify Pegleg face the moral question of whether to exact revenge on their alleged torturer.
“It is true that this film is set in the contemporary period, in the present moment, but in fact, it is a film for the post Islamic Republic of Iran,” he commented. “It is for the time that we think, what are we going to do now? Are we going to stop the cycle of violence or are we going to end it at some point?”
We asked if he foresaw an end to the Islamist regime that has ruled Iran since 1979.
“These regimes are never to last,” he said, “but when they are going to go, I don’t know.”
Jafar Panahi holds the Palme D’or award for ‘It Was Just an Accident’ at Cannes 2025.
Lionel Hahn/Getty Images
Panahi is one of only four directors to have won the top prize at Venice (the Golden Lion), Berlin (the Golden Bear), and Cannes (the Palme d’or).
“Winning these awards also confirmed that it’s perhaps more than what I thought,” he said modestly, “what anyone would think that these films were able to communicate with the audience.”
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
The Deadline Studio at TIFF is hosted at Bisha Hotel and sponsored by Cast & Crew and Final Draft.