What did Jafar Panahi Do After Prison in Iran? He Kept Making Movies.
During filming, the authorities discovered “It Was Just an Accident.” But a French producer had been engaged to finish this ultimate winner of the top prize at Cannes.
By Nicole Sperling
The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been imprisoned twice for making movies about his home country. It has yet to stop him. In 2010, he was sentenced to six years in prison for “propaganda against the state.” He was released after three months. In 2022, he was arrested again and served seven months, an incarceration that involved hours of blindfolded interrogation. Panahi translated the experience into the Palme d’Or winner “It Was Just an Accident.” Due in theaters on Wednesday, the film examines the effects of torture on both victim and perpetrator.
Lesser men might have been cowed into submission by those experiences. For Panahi, now 65, they were invigorating. “The reality is I don’t know anything else other than cinema, so I prepare myself for everything, and I accept all costs,” he said.
Panahi wasn’t thinking about filmmaking when he was last in jail. He was held in a very public ward, among 300 prisoners, some 30 to 40 of them there for political reasons. He said he spent most of his time listening to the fellow inmates’ life stories.
“When I got out of jail, I turned around and looked at the gate, and I remembered all those faces,” Panahi said through a translator during an interview at the Telluride Film Festival in August. He added that months later, “these faces started becoming more real and marched in my head. I felt that I owed them something.”
“It Was Just an Accident” is a revenge thriller that centers on a mechanic who believes he’s found the intelligence officer who tortured him when he was in prison....
That ban has been lifted, but because Panahi refuses to submit his scripts to the Iranian government for approval, he still shoots underground. He works with very small crews, often employing nonactors in key roles, and frequently shoots inside cars and in smaller villages where he isn’t recognized. He moves quickly from location to location. And he shares the completed script with only a few confidants, restricting his actors’ knowledge of the film to the scenes they are in. It’s a form of protection. Should they be detained, they can honestly respond that they don’t know what the movie is about.
Everyone knows the risks. They sign on regardless.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/movies/it-was-just-an-accident-jafar-panahi.html
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When Jafar Panahi Has a Story to Tell, Nothing Will Stop Him
By Anne Thompson
Panahi is a man who does not take “no” for an answer.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/when-jafar-panahi-has-a-story-to-tell-nothing-will-stop-him/ar-AA1MioOx