Jafar Panahi’s Cinema of Mutual Captivity
Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, Majid Panahi, and Hadis Pakbaten in It Was Just an Accident (2025), Courtesy of NEON.
Who are political movies made for? Such a question lingers around the edges of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s eleventh feature film, It Was Just an Accident. The film is Panahi’s first since the Islamic Republic of Iran, the regime that took power when Panahi was eighteen years old, lifted the 2010 ban they imposed that barred him from filmmaking. Nevertheless, during that decade-and-a-half ban, Panahi illegally directed five films, all of which thoughtfully defied the government’s desire to control his work and politics. Perhaps the regime lifted the ban in the hopes that Panahi would relax his focus. But with It Was Just an Accident, he draws the regime ever closer, as if to remind them that, because of their oppression and cruelty, he and they are linked, whether they like it or not.
The film opens with a death: Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) accidentally runs over a dog while driving on a rural road with his wife and daughter. His wife says that God must have put the dog in their path for a reason, and the film wonders if perhaps He did. The accident with the dog leads to car trouble, which leads to a trip to a mechanic, which leads to that mechanic suspecting that Eghbal is one of his former, particularly inhumane tormentors in an Iranian prison. The mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) kidnaps Eghbal and begins to bury him alive, only then questioning if he’s taken the wrong man. Vahid assembles a group of formerly imprisoned people in an attempt to confirm the man’s identity. The rest of the film follows from there, with the group carrying out their identification largely in public, driving an unconscious Eghbal through the city right under the nose of the regime.
Panahi didn’t make this film as a message to the Iranian government and its collaborators alone. Many of the film’s questions are aimed at a larger group: those who have been mistreated by their government. Panahi asks them to contemplate whether revenge is ever justified. He asks them to realize that developing a new intimacy with one’s tormentors is required for revenge, and suggests they consider how damaging that intimacy might be to the self. But these questions, while put directly to the oppressed, seem to be posed to the Iranian regime as well. Like a catalog of anthropological evidence, the film dynamically lays out the types of psychology that state brutality generates. Panahi presents the regime with full versions of its opponents while making clear that you can’t set up a surveillance state without also leading to greater surveillance of yourself.
Afssaneh Najmabadi, Delmaz Najafi, and Ebrahim Azizi in It Was Just an Accident (2025), Courtesy of NEON.
While Panahi is no longer under ban, he and other Iranian filmmakers are still required to submit their scripts for governmental approval. As the regime no doubt knows, this leads to hobbled, homogenous, non-confrontational art. Panahi, as one would guess, never showed the government his script, which again put him in the position of creating illegally. In the context of this political backdrop, the very public setting of the film sends a bold message. Panahi put his actors in the busy streets and crowded spaces of Tehran without approval. Out in the open, he managed to shoot his movie about kidnapping a member of the regime. This lends an energy and risk to the movie that might best be described as intrepid, reducing the regime on film to a caricature of befuddled defeat, a Sylvester the Cat to Panahi’s triumphant, witty Tweety Bird.
Yet the least tense moments in the film are also public. As Vahid and the group drive through the city with Eghbal in the van, the longer they go undetected, the more casual and comical the script becomes. It would be easy to forget that they are committing a crime or that they live in a country that has been known to execute its citizens for much milder offenses.[1] In moments, it almost seems as if the characters have lost interest in the kidnapping altogether. The actors dull their earlier outrage, returning to the more everyday emotional register that is necessary for carrying on with life under an authoritarian regime. But this is a skillful trick the film plays.
Panahi lulls the viewer into thinking that a lack of tension is imaginable in such a world, only to reveal that any lightness is impossible without accompanying menace and anguish. In the film, the public and its quotidian routine distract from trauma and the task at hand. Panahi focuses the camera on the chaotic, attention-grabbing public, interrupting the sustained passion necessary for vengeance. But when the film moves outside of the busy city, away from the noise, the tension reemerges, distilling and distilling until it must be confronted.
Vahid Mobasseri in It Was Just an Accident (2025), Courtesy of NEON.
In its relationship to the divine, the film arranges another interesting trick for viewers to decode. After Eghbal runs over the dog, his wife thinks God was somehow involved. For a while, it seems like she could be right. A God-like figure might be punishing Eghbal. Dogs, while sometimes thought of in Islam as impure creatures, function in the film almost as divine spirits of intuition.[2] In addition to the dog’s death that leads Eghbal to Vahid, a dog is present right before the kidnapping and also before the film’s final confrontation between suspected captor and former captive. The film raises the question of whose side God is on and suggests for a time that God favors the oppressed, despite the fact that the Islamic Republic claims divine sanction.
Yet, the masterful final shot of the film, which I will not spoil here, suggests that God was far from involved in the lives of any of these characters. God, it seems, did not order any cosmic retribution for Vahid and the group. God is irrelevant to the story, nowhere to be found, and it would not be an overreading to conclude that Panahi is signaling that God has long been absent for everyone in Iran (and for everyone in other oppressive regimes as well). But Panahi also doesn’t put forth that Vahid and Eghbal’s meeting was all just an accident.
Instead, It Was Just an Accident presents a sly new law of nature: when you abuse people or have been abused, you become linked to your counterpart in some way. Oppressor is not allowed to move beyond the oppressed, and vice versa, as if there’s a band that forms pulling them toward each other. With the film’s complex final moment, Panahi seems to be shouting a stark, biting message directly at the Iranian regime for us all to witness: “I will not forget about you. You cannot forget about me.”
It Was Just an Accident is currently playing in select theaters around the United States, including at Film Forum in New York City.
[1] Amnesty International, “Iran 2024” (Amnesty International, 2024).
[2] Sheriday Polinsky, “Dogs in the Islamic Tradition: A Revisionist Examination,” Society & Animals 32, no. 3 (Washington Grove: Animals and Society Institute, 2022), 270–286.
