How a Prison Sentence Helped an Iranian Director Win at Cannes

(Bloomberg) -- “I went to get some rest,” quipped Jafar Panahi about the months he spent in Iranian prison.

It was the director’s first time back at the Cannes Film Festival after the authorities in his home country banned him from making movies and traveling internationally for more than 14 years. Interviewed a few days before his film It Was Just An Accident won the Palme d’Or, he was remarkably good-humored while describing experiences most would consider traumatic—including two stints at Tehran’s Evin Prison, one of the world’s most infamous detention facilities for dissidents.

In 2010, Panahi was convicted of “propaganda against the state” and sentenced to six years in prison. He was released on bail after two months, having gone on a hunger strike to protest his detention. He continued to work covertly. Most of the guerrilla films that followed were meta-fictions starring himself that commented on his situation obliquely: He shot This Is Not a Film (2011) at home with an iPhone while under house arrest. In Taxi (2015), which takes place entirely inside a car, he plays an out-of-work filmmaker moonlighting as a taxi driver.

In 2022 his original sentence was reactivated when he protested the arrest of fellow filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. After seven months, he started a new hunger strike and was again given a conditional release, before his travel ban and sentence were finally lifted.

“After the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, because the prisons were swelling with all these new prisoners, the government granted [me] amnesty,” he said, referring to the protests that shook Iran for months starting in September 2022, sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police. 

Though Panahi has maintained he was a victim of injustice, he regards his time behind bars as beneficial. “I’ve changed a great deal since going to prison,” he explained. “So much so that I keep telling myself I wish I’d gone there sooner, because it brought me close to people I’d never met before.” These encounters directly inspired It Was Just an Accident.

The film begins with a man bringing his car to a garage for repairs. The mechanic, who was once imprisoned for political reasons, thinks the customer is the sadistic guard who tortured him. But he’d been blindfolded during the interrogations, so he can’t be sure. Torn between the desire to kill this man and the fear of hurting an innocent person, he kidnaps the stranger and seeks out other former detainees to confirm his suspicion. Each person he enlists shares the mechanic’s anger—and his doubts—and the group keeps growing as they drive through Tehran with their captive in tow, desperately pursuing a certainty that continues to elude them.

It’s a very angry film; it is also surprisingly funny. The fraught subject matter is tempered by an undercurrent of farce, drawing on the absurdity of the situation and the ineptitude of these sympathetic would-be executioners. The narrative is also peppered with recurring gags: Whenever someone is asked for help or information—even a nurse at the hospital—they inevitably demand a tip. 

For Panahi, it was natural to include such comic touches. “Sense of humor is part of our culture,” he says. “A major disaster strikes, and 10 minutes later, people are already making jokes about it.” 

After a decade and a half of suppression, one could reasonably have expected the director to retreat to a safer mode of filmmaking. On the contrary, It Was Just an Accident tackles taboo subjects like institutionalized torture head-on, and openly disregards the state’s strict censorship laws by showing women without hijabs. (Panahi shot the film furtively in Iran and edited it in France. Details about the production are kept scarce, at least in part to protect himself and the other people involved.)

In the context of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, such directness is exceptionally rare, especially from directors who wish to remain in the country. In early 2024, Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison and flogging for his films and activism. At the time, he was shooting The Seed of the Sacred Fig in secret. Inspired by the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, the film shows real footage from the demonstrations, including acts of police brutality. Expecting that it would only worsen his case once released, Rasoulof fled Iran before the sentence was executed and now lives in Berlin.

There may be reason to hope that this state of affairs is changing. Asked if he was worried about returning home from Cannes, Panahi said only, “God knows, no specific expectation. All I know is that I’m going back. Then we’ll see what happens.” He was met by a cheering crowd of supporters at the airport in Tehran, and has since traveled to numerous countries around the world to present the film. This month he’s due to attend the New York Film Festival for the first time in 25 years.

While the publicity surrounding his Palme d’Or likely helped Panahi avoid immediate repercussions, the changes set in motion by the Woman, Life, Freedom protests could be even more significant. “The circumstances in Iran are not freer at the moment, but the government is in no position to return to the previous status quo, because people are resisting,” he said. “Every day the government imposes new punishments and yet people keep doing their own thing.”

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