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The National
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
It Was Just an Accident review: Jafar Panahi's new Cannes film rages against the Iranian state
One of the biggest stories at the Cannes Film Festival this year is the return of Iranian director Jafar Panahi. It's not simply that he has a new film. He's been making movies for the past three decades, ever since his 1995 debut The White Balloon won the Camera d'Or for Best First Film in Cannes. Since that time, he has fallen foul of the Iranian authorities for his work. Imprisoned twice, he is officially banned from making movies or even giving interviews. So for Panahi to arrive in Cannes with his new film, It Was Just an Accident, which is in competition, is something of a coup. Especially when you take a look at the film, a morality tale about vengeance that simmers with anger. It begins with a man (Ebrahim Azizi) driving his wife and daughter when they have an accident, killing an animal. This roadkill leads the man into the path of Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who works at a garage. Immediately Vahid is unsettled, believing he knows this man from the past. In his eyes, this is Eghbal the Peg Leg, also known as The Gimp, a one-legged state interrogator who was responsible for the brutal torture of Vahid and many others. He kidnaps Eghbal and takes him to the desert where he plans to bury him alive, despite the man's protests that he is not who Vahid thinks he is. Having second thoughts, Vahid decides to confirm his identity, tying him up inside a trunk in the back of his van. His enquiries lead him to Shiva (Maryam Afshari). She is a photographer on an assignment snapping a bride Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten) and a groom (Majid Panahi, the director's nephew). All three have crossed paths with Eghbal in the past. A further figure is thrown into the mix, the hot-headed Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), who appears desperate to pull the trigger on this captive. 'We're at war,' he yells. 'If you don't kill, you'll be killed.' In a slightly convenient narrative twist, the group decide to drug Eghbal and put earplugs in his ears, so he can't identity them. We never see this and there's no real indication of how they managed that. But let's allow Panahi this one moment of artistic licence. As much as the film's writer-director stokes the tension, he's not afraid to punctuate the narrative with moments of humour. These include two security guards who witness a ruckus in Vahid's van, then happily accept a bribe, with one even producing a remote point-of-sale terminal to swipe Vahid's credit card (a piece of plastic that takes a serious hit throughout this story). The final act, however, is both surprising and hard to watch, as Eghbal – if indeed that's who it is – is confronted by his kidnappers. With the scene bathed in blood red, it'll leave you on the edge of your seat. Even more impressive are the performances. Only Azizi, who plays Eghbal, is a professional actor, but Panahi draws powerful turns from all of the cast, especially Afshari, who dominates the final scenes. A film that rages against the Iranian state, it's almost impossible to separate the creator from the creation here. Panahi's anger is laid out for all to see, as he takes a sledgehammer to the oppressive regimes he has encountered. There's even a reference to ISIS, and how they kill innocent people, reasoning that those who have committed no crime will go to Heaven. Whatever the case, if this wins Cannes' Palme d'Or, it would be no accident.
BBC News
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
It Was Just an Accident review: Jafar Panahi's 'taut revenge thriller' becomes frontrunner to take Cannes' top prize
After years of imprisonment and travel bans in his native Iran, Jafar Panahi returns to Cannes with a furious but funny revenge thriller that takes aim at oppressive regimes and could scoop the Palme d'Or. The film opens with a long, unbroken, deceptively charming shot of a genial man (Ebrahim Azizi) and his happy, pregnant wife driving in the countryside one evening, with their playful daughter in the back seat. When the car breaks down, the husband persuades a mechanic to tinker with it, but then the mechanic's rumpled colleague Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) recognises a chilling combination of sounds: the uneven footsteps of someone with a limp, and the squeaks of an artificial leg. One of the themes running through the competition films at this year's Cannes Film Festival is how hard it can be to battle your way to justice when the state is standing in your way. In Two Prosecutors, the bureaucracy in Stalin's USSR grinds truth to dust. In Eagles of the Republic, an Egyptian actor finds himself being directed by slimy officials, both at work and at home. Dossier 137 is set in today's France, but even there, a police investigation is obstructed by systems that protect some kinds of wrongdoers more than others. The most immediate and personal of these films is It Was Just an Accident, written and directed by Jafar Panahi. Panahi has repeatedly been imprisoned and banned from film-making in his native Iran, and has been subject to so many travel bans that he hasn't been in Cannes since 2003 (although his films have), so it's hardly surprising that his latest film is so frank about life under an oppressive regime. What may be more surprising is that It Was Just an Accident balances fury with warmth, humour and sympathy for its characters, even when taking on the grimmest possible subject matter. These sounds, which have haunted Vahid's nightmares for years, recall someone he calls Peg Leg, a sadistic interrogator who tortured him while he was incarcerated on trumped-up sedition charges. On impulse, Vahid knocks the man out with a shovel, and stuffs him in a box in the back of his van. He plans to bury Peg Leg alive in the desert – and the film, with its dusty mountain vistas, comes to feel like a classic Western tale of frontier justice. But wait. Vahid was always blindfolded while he was in prison, and so he can't be certain that the man he has caught is Peg Leg, after all. He decides to drive into the city to get a second opinion from a friend who was locked up with him, but even then, things aren't so simple. Before long, Vahid's van is full of former prisoners arguing over the question, including a shrewd wedding photographer (Mariam Afshari), an angry woman (Hadis Pakbaten) who is getting married the next day, and a bitter man (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr) who is more than willing to throttle Vahid's captive, whether he is Peg Leg or not. It Was Just an Accident is a taut and twisting revenge thriller loaded with heavyweight ethical quandaries. It is heartbreakingly explicit about what the well-drawn characters have suffered, but it asks whether they can ever be justified in using the same methods – abduction, torture – as their oppressors. Even if they can be sure that their captive is Peg Leg, do they have the right to execute him? On the other hand, do they have a choice? Have they gone so far that they will be in more trouble if they release him than if they finish the job? More like this:• Gay romance The History of Sound is 'too polite'• The sensational breakout star of The Phoenician Scheme• Alpha review: Outlandish Aids horror is 'maddening' Panahi mixes these issues with a healthy dose of comedy. Vahid and his associates are no bloodthirsty vigilantes, but a bickering bunch who may be foiled in their mission by running out of petrol: at one point, they have to push the van to a garage, including the bride-to-be in her white wedding dress. Meanwhile, they aren't just looking over their shoulders for the secret police, they're being irritated by endemic, low-level corruption. One of several wry examples has two security guards producing their own portable card readers so that they can accept bribes from people who don't have any cash on them. These farcical vignettes aren't just light relief, though. They bolster Panahi's powerful point that heroes and villains aren't all monumental figures in uniform. Those who have committed the worst evils, those who have endured them, and those who have stood back and let those evils happen, can all be seen on any sunny city street, getting on with their ordinary lives with friends and relatives. Panahi puts these terrifying yet touchingly humane insights into a film that is as fast-moving and unpretentious as any crime caper. He could well go back to Iran with Cannes' top prize, the Palme d'Or, after the festival finishes this weekend. ★★★★☆ -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A Simple Accident review – Jafar Panahi takes us on a nightmare trip into a land of bribes and brutality
Jafar Panahi is the veteran Iranian auteur and democracy campaigner who continues to get arrested and imprisoned, to endure film-making bans and defy the law, finding loopholes through which his movies can be made and shown abroad. And the Iranian authorities, tensely and hypocritically aware of world scrutiny and indeed the soft-power prestige still to be accrued from Panahi's eminence, appear (almost) to tolerate it. Now Panahi has come to Cannes with what might be his most emotionally explicit film yet: a film about state violence and revenge, about the pain of tyranny that co-exists with ostensible everyday normality. There are macabre stabs of satire, black comedy and horror-farce, and the movie almost looks like an Iranian dissident tribute to Weekend at Bernie's or even Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry. A man (Ebrahim Azizi) is driving at night with his heavily pregnant wife and young daughter in the car and suffers the time-honoured suspense thriller shock-premise of hitting something in the darkness: a dog. This simple accident causes his car to break down after just five minutes back on the road, and he finds himself pulling over at random at a garage belonging to Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), nicknamed 'Jughead' because of his habit of holding his painful kidneys with one hand, his arm like a jug handle. The driver has a disability too, a limp, and Vahid is stunned, scared and angry to realise that he knows this man; and it sets in train a bizarre series of events that reunites a disparate cohort of Vahid's acquaintances who have all suffered at the hands of the state. These include bookseller Salar, wedding photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari), the couple whose wedding photos she is taking, bride Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) and groom Ali (Majid Panahi), and local hothead Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr). A grotesque, almost dreamlike sequence of scenes takes us to various locations, including a remote desert with a tree that Hamid says looks a stage-set for Waiting for Godot. The plot twists and turns are startling, almost unreal; can it be true that normal people like this can countenance violence? But if that seems implausible, perhaps that is because we don't grasp the violence through which they have already lived. The narrative jolts and shunts us around like Vahid and his contemporaries in the back of his van; so do the shifts in tone from tragedy to comedy and back. But these storytelling chicanes never quite get us to the shark-jumping point of facetiousness or absurdity that they might in another, Anglo-Hollywood type of movie. There is some acid satire on Iranian officialdom's addiction to bribes. A hospital nurse asks Vahid if he knows how to give a 'present' or just make a scandal – and she wants a box of pastries to go with the money. A couple of shifty, dodgy security guards ask for a 'present' in exchange for not making a fuss about the suspicious behaviour in the van, and not having cash doesn't let Vahid off; these uniformed guys grinningly produce a debit card reader. They take bribes in the form of contactless payments. Perhaps Joe Orton might have enjoyed this tough, cynical movie, especially the group scenes in which Goli has to participate in the mayhem wearing her wedding dress. It's another very impressive serio-comic film from one of the most distinctive and courageous figures in world cinema. A Simple Accident screened at the Cannes film festival.
New York Times
29-04-2025
- New York Times
Cargo That Set Off Blast at Iran Port Was Improperly Documented, Investigators Say
Iranian officials investigating a huge explosion at a strategic port in southern Iran have said they found 'false statements' in the documentation for the shipment believed to have triggered the blast, which the authorities say has now killed 70 people. The explosion on Saturday at the Shahid Rajaee port, Iran's largest, triggered a fire that lasted for hours and emitted towering columns of black smoke, according to local authorities. A statement released on Monday by the government committee investigating the blast said it had found evidence of 'failure to observe safety principles.' It added that investigators were seeking to identify those behind what it described as 'false statements' in the documentation of the cargo. Iranian officials have told state news agencies that the cargo should have been identified as a shipment holding dangerous substances — the details of which they did not specify. Instead, the officials said, the shipment was classified and stored in the port as a container holding ordinary goods. Video Surveillance footage from the port captured a growing fire before the explosion. Credit Credit... Reuters The Iranian authorities have so far released little information as to where and when the shipment arrived, what substances were in the cargo, and which ship carried the goods into the port, which handles a substantial portion of the oil exports critical to supporting Iran's foundering economy. A person with ties to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps told The New York Times last week that the chemical set ablaze was sodium perchlorate, a major ingredient in solid fuel for missiles. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss security matters. The blast on Saturday was so powerful that forensics specialists were still working to identify 22 bodies from the 70 people declared dead, the provincial governor told official news agency IRNA on Monday. Among the nearly 1,200 people injured, state media said, some 120 were still being treated in hospitals. The Shahid Rajaee port handled 85 percent of Iran's shipping container traffic last year, according to national statistics. It is situated in a southern region of Iran along the Strait of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf meets the Gulf of Oman — one of the world's most critical shipping lanes for oil and gas. In the past, the port been a target of foreign attack: Israel launched a cyberattack in 2020 that hampered operations at the port as part of its long-running shadow war with Iran. Neither Israeli or Iranian officials have made statements to indicate that last week's blast was the result of an attack. In a television interview on Monday, Ebrahim Azizi, chairman of the Iranian parliament's security and foreign policy committee, eschewed any reference to an attack. He also did not respond to the interviewer's speculation as to whether the importer's false documentation might have been an attempt to save money. In its statement, the committee vowed on Monday to make the results of its investigation public 'as soon as possible.'
Saba Yemen
17-04-2025
- Politics
- Saba Yemen
Iranian Parliament Head of National Security Committee: "Grossi should be honest"
Tehran - Saba: Chairman of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, Ebrahim Azizi, called on the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, who is currently visiting Tehran, to be honest. According to Tasnim News Agency, Azizi wrote in a blog post on the X platform on Thursday: "The IAEA is a technical authority, and its prestige is linked to this." "We expect him to have technical control in Tehran and honesty outside it," he added. "Therefore, its decisions should not be subject to the ambitions of major powers," he said. Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), arrived in Tehran yesterday at the head of a technical delegation for a two-day visit to enhance bilateral cooperation between Iran and the agency, during which he will meet with Iranian officials. Whatsapp Telegram Email Print more of (International)
