Jafar Panahi wins Palme d'Or at Cannes 2025 for ‘It Was Just An Accident' filmed in secret
Iranian director Jafar Panahi won the Palme d'Or at the 78th Cannes Film Festival on Saturday for It Was Just An Accident (Un Simple Accident), a tense revenge drama shot in secret.
The film follows a garage owner who kidnaps a one-legged man resembling the person he believes once tortured him in prison. The story confronts justice, memory, and the burden of vengeance.
Panahi, who had been banned from filmmaking in Iran for 15 years, dedicated the prize 'to all Iranians,' saying: 'Hoping that we will reach a day when no one will tell us what to wear or not wear, what to do or not do.' He added, 'Win or not, I was going to go back either way. Don't be afraid of challenges.'
Returning to the festival in person for the first time since 2003, Panahi said: 'Every moment was thrilling.' Jury president Juliette Binoche called the film 'a force that transforms darkness into forgiveness, hope and new life.'
The Grand Prix went to Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value. The Jury Prize was shared between Sirat by Oliver Laxe and Sound of Falling by Mascha Schilinski. Brazil's The Secret Agent earned Best Actor for Wagner Moura and Best Director for Kleber Mendonça Filho. Nadia Melliti won Best Actress for The Little Sister. The Dardenne brothers received Best Screenplay for Young Mothers.
Panahi's win is his third major European prize, joining the Golden Bear and Golden Lion, and only the second time an Iranian film has won the Palme d'Or.
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Express Tribune
27-05-2025
- Express Tribune
Panahi's homecoming cheered in Tehran after Cannes triumph
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was given a hero's welcome by supporters on his return to Tehran on Monday after winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival, footage posted on social media showed, reported AFP. After being banned from leaving Iran for years, forced to make films underground and enduring spells in prison, Panahi attended the French festival in person and sensationally walked away with the Palme d'Or for his latest offering, It Was Just an Accident. With some fans concerned that Panahi could face trouble on his return to Iran, he arrived without incident at Tehran's main international airport, named after the founder of the 1979 Islamic revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in the early hours of Monday. "He arrived in Tehran early this morning" and "has returned home," French film producer Philippe Martin told AFP, citing his entourage. "He has even learned that he has obtained a visa to go to a festival in Sydney in about ten days' time." Panahi was cheered by supporters waiting in the public area as he descended the escalator from passport control to baggage collection, footage posted by the Dadban legal monitor showed on social media. One person could be heard shouting "Woman. Life. Freedom!" — the slogan of the 2022-2023 protest movement that shook the Iranian authorities. On exiting, he was greeted by around a dozen supporters who had stayed up to welcome him, according to footage posted on Instagram by the Iranian director Mehdi Naderi and broadcast by the Iran International Channel, which is based outside Iran. Smiling broadly and waving, he was cheered, applauded, hugged and presented with flowers. "Fresh blood in the veins of Iranian independent cinema," Naderi wrote. 'Gesture of resistance' The warm welcome at the airport contrasted with the lukewarm reaction from Iranian state media and officials to the first Palme d'Or for an Iranian filmmaker since The Taste of Cherry by the late Abbas Kiarostami in 1997. While evoked by state media including the IRNA news agency, Panahi's triumph has received only thin coverage inside Iran and has also sparked a diplomatic row with France. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot called his victory "a gesture of resistance against the Iranian regime's oppression" in a post on X, prompting Tehran to summon France's charge d'affaires to protest the "insulting" comments. "I am not an art expert, but we believe that artistic events and art in general should not be exploited to pursue political objectives," said foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei. The film is politically charged, showing five Iranians confronting a man they believe tortured them in prison, a story inspired by Panahi's own time in detention. After winning the prize, Panahi made a call for freedom in Iran. "Let's set aside all problems, all differences. What matters most right now is our country and the freedom of our country." In an earlier interview with the Guardian prior to winning the Palme d'Or, Panahi expanded on how his own time in prison ended up forming the bedrock for the events that unfold in It Was Just an Accident. "I was on my own in a tiny cell and they would take me out blindfolded to a place where I would sit in front of a wall and hear this voice at my back. It was the voice of the man who would question me – sometimes for two hours, sometimes for eight hours," he recalled. The filmmaker added that he spent his time in jail "fantasising" about the person behind the voice. "I had an intuition that someday this voice would be an aspect of something I'd write or shoot and give a creative life to," he noted.
Express Tribune
25-05-2025
- Express Tribune
From prison cell to Cannes
Jafar Panahi never set out to be a political filmmaker. "In my definition, a political filmmaker defends an ideology where the good follow it and the bad oppose it," the Iranian director says. "In my films, even those who behave badly are shaped by the system, not personal choice," he tells DW. But for more than a decade, Panahi has had little choice. Following his support for the opposition Green Movement protests, the director of The White Balloon and The Circle, was handed a 20-year ban on filmmaking and international travel in 2010. That didn't stop him. Over the years, he found new ways to shoot, edit, and smuggle out his films — from turning his living room into a film set (This Is Not a Film) to using a car as a mobile studio (in Taxi, which won the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlinale). Last week, Panahi stepped back into the spotlight — not through smuggled footage or video calls, but in person. For the first time in over two decades, the now 64-year-old filmmaker returned to the Cannes Film Festival to present his latest feature, It Was Just an Accident, premiering in competition to an emotional 8-minute standing ovation. Prison to the Palais The road to Cannes has been anything but smooth. Panahi was arrested again in July 2022 and detained in Tehran's notorious Evin prison. After almost seven months and a hunger strike, he was released in February 2023. In a stunning legal victory, Iran's Supreme Court overturned his original 2010 sentence. Panahi was legally free, but artistically still bound by a system he refuses to submit to. "To make a film in the official way in Iran, you have to submit your script to the Islamic Guidance Ministry for approval," he tells DW. "This is something I cannot do. I made another clandestine film. Again." That film, It Was Just An Accident, may be Panahi's most direct confrontation yet with state violence and repression. Shot in secret and featuring unveiled female characters in defiance of Iran's hijab law, the film tells the story of a group of ex-prisoners who believe they've found the man who tortured them — and must decide whether to exact revenge. The taut, 24-hour drama unfolds like a psychological thriller. Stylistically, It Was Just An Accident is a sharp break from the more contained, and largely self-reflexive works Panahi made while under his official state ban, but the plot remains strongly autobiographical. Thriller that cuts deep The film opens with a banal tragedy — a man accidentally kills a dog with his car - and spirals into a slow-burning reckoning with state-sanctioned cruelty. Vahid (Valid Mobasseri), a mechanic who is asked to repair the damaged car, thinks he recognises the owner as Eghbal, aka Peg-Leg, his former torturer. He kidnaps him, planning to bury him alive in the desert. But he can't be sure he's got the right man, because he was blindfolded during his internment. "They kept us blindfolded, during interrogation or when we left our cells," Panahi recalls of his time in prison. "Only in the toilet could you remove the blindfold." Seeking reassurance, the mechanic reaches out to fellow prisoners for confirmation. Soon Vahid's van is packed with victims seeking revenge on the man who abused them for nothing more than voicing opposition to the authorities. There's a bride (Hadis Pakbaten) who abandons her wedding, together with her wedding photographer and former inmate Shiva (Maryam Afshari), to go after the man who raped and tortured her. There's Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), a man so traumatised and so furious by his experience he doesn't care if the man they've caught is the right guy; he just wants vengeance. "Even dead, they're a scourge on humanity," he says of all the intelligence officers serving under the regime. As the group debates vengeance vs non-violence, alongside brutal descriptions of the beatings and torture they endured, Panahi inserts sly moments of humour and touches of the absurd. The hostage-takers cross paths with Eghbal's family, including his heavily pregnant wife, and suddenly find themselves rushing her to the hospital to give birth. Afterwards, as is tradition in Iran, Vahid heads to a bakery to buy everyone pastries. "All these characters that you see in this film were inspired by conversations that I had in prison, by stories people told me about the violence and the brutality of the Iranian government, violence that has been ongoing for more than four decades now," says Panahi. "In a way, I'm not the one who made this film. It's the Islamic Republic that made this film, because they put me in prison. Maybe if they want to stop us being so subversive, they should stop putting us in jail." No escape, no exile Despite a career defined by resistance, Panahi insists he's simply doing the only thing he knows how. "During my 20-year ban, even my closest friends had given up hope that I would ever make films again," he said at the Cannes press conference for It Was Just An Accident. "But people who know me know I can't change a lightbulb. I don't know how to do anything except make films". While many Iranian filmmakers have fled into exile - including Panahi's close friend Mohammad Rasoulof, director of the Oscar-nominated The Seed of the Sacred Fig, who now lives in Berlin — Panahi says he has no plans to join them. "I'm completely incapable of adjusting to another society," he says. "I had to be in Paris for three and a half months for post-production, and I thought I was going to die." In Iran, he explained, filmmaking is a communal act of improvisation and trust. "At 2AM I can call a colleague and say: 'That shot should be longer.' And he'll come join me and we'll work all night. In Europe, you can't work like this. I don't belong." So, even after his Cannes triumph, Panahi will return home. "As soon as I finish my work here, I will go back to Iran the next day. And I will ask myself: What's my next film going to be?"
Express Tribune
25-05-2025
- Express Tribune
Jafar Panahi wins Palme d'Or at Cannes 2025 for ‘It Was Just An Accident' filmed in secret
Iranian director Jafar Panahi won the Palme d'Or at the 78th Cannes Film Festival on Saturday for It Was Just An Accident (Un Simple Accident), a tense revenge drama shot in secret. The film follows a garage owner who kidnaps a one-legged man resembling the person he believes once tortured him in prison. The story confronts justice, memory, and the burden of vengeance. Panahi, who had been banned from filmmaking in Iran for 15 years, dedicated the prize 'to all Iranians,' saying: 'Hoping that we will reach a day when no one will tell us what to wear or not wear, what to do or not do.' He added, 'Win or not, I was going to go back either way. Don't be afraid of challenges.' Returning to the festival in person for the first time since 2003, Panahi said: 'Every moment was thrilling.' Jury president Juliette Binoche called the film 'a force that transforms darkness into forgiveness, hope and new life.' The Grand Prix went to Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value. The Jury Prize was shared between Sirat by Oliver Laxe and Sound of Falling by Mascha Schilinski. Brazil's The Secret Agent earned Best Actor for Wagner Moura and Best Director for Kleber Mendonça Filho. Nadia Melliti won Best Actress for The Little Sister. The Dardenne brothers received Best Screenplay for Young Mothers. Panahi's win is his third major European prize, joining the Golden Bear and Golden Lion, and only the second time an Iranian film has won the Palme d'Or.
