Jafar Panahi of It Was Just an Accident during the Toronto International Film Festival at InterContinental Toronto Centre on Sept. 7.Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
My afternoon meeting with Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi threatens to go off the rails before it begins, though it is no fault of the director’s. As can happen when conducting an interview via a translator, a gentle miscommunication trips up my opening line.
Situated inside the bustling space of Canadian film distributor Elevation Pictures during the Toronto International Film Festival last month, we’re both offered a cute but curious looking bottle of dark-green elixir, containing everything from spinach to ginger to myriad “antioxidants” of unknown provenance that promise a much-needed jolt in the midst of a busy TIFF. An exhausted-looking Panahi, sporting his trademark shades indoors, politely accepts the drink, while I wave it away, noting that it looks more frightening than refreshing or energizing.
Jafar Panahi attends the premiere of It Was Just an Accident during TIFF 2025 at Royal Alexandra Theatre on Sept. 9.Robert Okine/Getty Images
“So, you’re scared of him?” Panahi’s translator asks.
“No, no, I’m scared of the drink!” I stammer.
“Do you not want me to drink it?” Panahi cautiously asks in Persian.
“No, no, oh man, go for it!”
The conversation jumps over that hump well enough, though looking back, it’s not as if Panahi’s response was unreasonable. The filmmaker might not strike fear into the hearts of film-junket journalists, but he has certainly frightened Iranian authorities over the past few decades. Despite their many attempts at imprisoning and muzzling Panahi, though, the director has always stared down his enemies with force, his wild and inventive work – everything from 2015’s hybrid docudrama Taxi to 2022’s sharp satire No Bears – revealing the cowards that they are.
And now, after having spent seven months in Iran’s notorious Evin prison, charged with the specious crime of “propaganda against the system,” Panahi is back with what might be his masterpiece, It Was Just an Accident.
Afssaneh Najmabadi, Delmaz Najafi, and Ebrahim Azizi in It Was Just An Accident.Elevation Pictures
The film follows a handful of Iranians who also served time in Evin for dubious charges – although, unlike Panahi, these former prisoners encounter a man who may or may not have been their torturer. Quickly, the potential villain is abducted and held for questioning, his past becoming a way of unlocking the future of the country: Can people stay not only inside a country whose leaders once marked them for death, but also alongside their neighbours who carried out the dirty work?
The new film is part revenge story, part observational comedy and part mournful tragedy. There was little surprise that this year’s Cannes jury awarded it the Palme d’Or. This is a work of singular artistry, power and political courage – the result of a filmmaker trying to reckon with a country that he both loves and has been unjustly punished by.
And yet, Panahi does not consider himself a political filmmaker, exactly.
“All the characters are political. Some of them are on one side, some on the other. What I think the definition of political cinema, as far as I’m concerned, means partisan, ideological, which divides people into good and bad,” Panahi says. “In socially engaged cinema, though, you don’t have purely good or purely bad characters. Such cinema allows everyone to speak what they think. Perhaps outside my films, I have political sides, but in my films, the process of making my films, I believe in social engagement.”
That engagement wasn’t always so readily possible, though. For more than 15 years, Panahi faced a travel ban – it was typical of film festivals around the world to reserve him a symbolically open seat, a “Jafar Panahi” placard resting where the director should have been comfortably situated. (There are other, more apocryphal tales of his absence, too, including the now-dispelled rumour that a copy of his 2011 project This Is Not a Film was smuggled from Tehran to Cannes on a USB stick buried inside a cake.)
Jafar Panahi spent seven months in Iran’s notorious Evin prison, which inspired his film It Was Just An Accident.Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Today, Panahi is making up for lost time, hitting the festival circuit hard – Cannes this past spring, then Telluride, Toronto and New York – as U.S. distributor Neon pushes the film into the Oscars conversation. Still, even this newly rediscovered promotional freedom clashes with Panahi’s twinned preoccupations: enjoying his home, and making movies.
“When you make a film and travel with it, you are constantly on trips, do interviews, go to festivals, and these things are time-consuming. When you don’t have to leave Iran, now you have more time to think about your next film,” he says. “I even joked that it might be if all governments banned their filmmakers from travelling, so that they can simply make more films!”
Another thing that might have taken some getting used for Panahi is not putting himself into his own work. The director’s past five features, all essentially made underground – This Is Not a Film, Closed Curtain, Taxi, 3 Faces and No Bears – pivoted around a character named “Jafar Panahi,” played by the director himself in an act of razor-thin autofiction. It Was Just an Accident, though, is absent any trace of “Jafar.”
This new development arrives as something of a relief.
When he was first told by the Iranian regime he couldn’t make films, ”it really affected me psychologically. If not making films, what can I do? Maybe I’d become a cab driver, but I wouldn’t be a good one. I would think, well, that’s just an excuse to hide cameras around the car, and record the stories of my passengers. That was how Taxi was made. It was really not in my control, putting myself in the centre of filmmaking,” Panahi says. “But as soon as the bans and limitations were lifted, I was able to step aside and make a film in the usual sense.”
May he continue to frighten those in power – and quaff as many energy drinks as he can he can muster – for years to come.
It Was Just an Accident opens in select theatres Oct. 24.