It Was Just an Accident

Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2025, Panahi's first major prize after two decades of being banned from filmmaking, surveilled, repeatedly imprisoned, and forbidden to leave Iran. He was finally permitted to travel for the festival; the Palme was widely read as both a recognition of the film and an act of solidarity. It was Panahi's eighth feature, and his most directly political since The White Balloon in 1995.

The film follows a former political prisoner who recognises a man he believes was his torturer, and recruits other survivors to help him decide what to do. The premise reads as a revenge thriller, but Panahi pushes it into something stranger and more morally restless: each survivor remembers the man differently, identification keeps slipping, and the film moves into farcical comedy at moments, the kind of dark Iranian humour that Panahi has refined since Closed Curtain and Taxi Tehran.

The film was made under the conditions of Panahi's continuing surveillance, smuggled out of Iran for completion. The technical limitations (long takes, minimal crew, almost no exteriors) are turned into formal virtues. The cast is a mix of professionals and political-prisoner survivors playing versions of themselves; the resulting performances have an authority no rehearsal could produce.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most morally serious film of 2025, and the work of a director who has made artistic freedom under repression his subject. The Palme d'Or it won is the right one, for the film and for what its existence demonstrates.