Jafar Panahi sank into his chair towards a brick wall and stared into the Zoom name. “It’s such as you’re me from the underside of a nicely,” he mentioned, half-joking, finding out my video feed.
I used to be supposed to fulfill Panahi in individual for the North American premiere of It Was Simply an Accident, his first movie since being launched from jail in Tehran two years in the past. However because of the U.S. authorities shutdown, his visa didn’t come by way of in time, so my journey from upstate New York to town proved pointless, and we needed to resort to Zoom. Ever the director, Panahi instructed me to regulate my digicam so the correct amount of my head and torso was in body. Solely then was he prepared to speak.
Jafar Panahi is among the most celebrated filmmakers alive. Simply months earlier than we talked, he’d received the Palme d’Or at Cannes, making him solely the fifth filmmaker in historical past (and the one residing one) to win the highest prize in any respect three main European festivals. But to many Iranians, Panahi is called a lot for his defiance as for his cinema. His political outspokenness and world visibility have lengthy introduced him into battle with the federal government, which stays uneasy with impartial artists. This pressure reached a breaking level in 2010, following the Inexperienced Motion protests. Whereas Panahi was engaged on a movie along with his buddy and collaborator Mohammad Rasoulof, safety brokers raided his dwelling, confiscated their gear, and hauled them and several other others to Tehran’s infamous Evin Jail.
Behind bars, Panahi went on starvation strike, sparking outrage throughout the worldwide movie neighborhood. At Cannes, the jury positioned an empty chair onstage to spotlight his absence. By the top of the 12 months, a courtroom had convicted Panahi of “meeting and colluding with the intention to commit crimes towards the nation’s nationwide safety and propaganda towards the Islamic Republic,” and issued a draconian sentence: six years in jail and a 20-year ban from filmmaking, giving interviews, and leaving the nation.
Panahi was launched after a couple of months, positioned below home arrest, and went on to make a number of movies in secret. In 2022, he was as soon as once more arrested and imprisoned, triggering outrage. This time, upon his launch seven months later, a choose dropped the costs and lifted Panahi’s excellent ban. Then Panahi started working. It Was Simply an Accident is the primary movie he has made in relative freedom in nearly 20 years.
In the previous couple of months, Panahi has given dozens of interviews whereas touring internationally to advertise It Was Simply an Accident, which has been the topic of a lot important acclaim. However little has been mentioned about the way it matches into his broader cinematic venture. I’ve adopted Panahi’s profession intently, watched each film shortly after it got here out, and spent many hours in dorm rooms and cafes in Tehran discussing his work with my friends and pals. This compelled me to view his final movie within the context of his physique of labor as a filmmaker. It Was Simply an Accident has unmistakable echoes with Panahi’s earlier work, but it surely additionally looks like a departure: a extra bold chapter from a filmmaker who has spent three many years testing the boundaries of cinema and the boundaries of expression.
A movie nonetheless from It Was Simply an Accident.Jafar Panahi Productions, Les Movies Pelléas, Bidibul Productions, Pio & Co, and Arte France Cinéma
“He who fights with monsters ought to be cautious lest he thereby turn into a monster,” the German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his 1886 ebook, Past Good and Evil. “For once you gaze lengthy into the abyss, the abyss additionally gazes into you.” It’s a becoming abstract for It Was Simply an Accident.
Vahid, a former political prisoner at Evin, works as a mechanic on the outskirts of Tehran. One night, a automobile pulls up outdoors his office, and the motive force asks for assist. Vahid overhears and acknowledges the voice immediately—it’s Eghbal, the person who as soon as tortured him in jail. Though he was blindfolded all through his interrogations, Vahid remembers the voice, in addition to the squeak of the person’s synthetic limb.
After the automobile is repaired, Vahid follows Eghbal dwelling. He kidnaps Eghbal the subsequent day and drives him to a distant spot outdoors Tehran. He’s about to bury the person alive when Eghbal begins to plead, insisting he’s not who Vahid thinks he’s. Vahid wells up with doubt, unsure if he has the proper man. So he calls up his fellow former prisoners, two males and two girls, who cram into Vahid’s van and set off on a wierd odyssey throughout Tehran to verify the person’s id.
None of them are positive, till Hamid comes on board. In jail, Hamid was pressured to the touch his interrogator’s wounded leg, so when he sees Eghbal, he simply identifies him because the ruthless man who ruined their lives. However confirming the person’s id seems to be the straightforward half. The true query is what to do with him.
The ragtag group of former inmates, who’ve clashing political persuasions, temperaments, and values, turn into embroiled in lengthy, generally violent debates. Ought to they let Eghbal go? Kill him? Or would killing their former captor flip them into the very monsters they hope to avenge?
For the final 4 many years, many Iranians, myself included, have felt that it was simpler to think about the top of the world than the top of the Islamic Republic. However that’s not the case. The hole between the Iranian folks and their rulers is rising, the economic system is in free fall, and corruption is devouring the ruling elite from inside. Iran has skilled extra nationwide uprisings during the last decade than within the 35 years prior.
For the primary time in many years, the query is not simply tips on how to eliminate this authorities however what to do with its officers as soon as they’re faraway from energy. This, it appears, is Panahi’s central focus in It Was Simply an Accident.
Panahi has lived by way of a lot of what his characters endure within the movie. Throughout his imprisonment, he spent days in solitary confinement and numerous hours in interrogation rooms—blindfolded, seated on a tough wood chair going through the wall, listening to the respiratory and actions of the interrogator behind him.
“More often than not within the interrogation room was spent on written Q and A,” he informed me. “The man would write a query on a chunk of paper, put it in entrance of me, and I’d write my reply, seeing the web page solely by way of the slender crack beneath the blindfold. However as a filmmaker, I’m all the time attentive to sounds and voices, and I used to be so targeted on what I heard that I might barely write my solutions.”
Whereas his interrogator waited for Panahi’s responses, the director discovered himself attempting to assemble a picture of this man holding him captive. How previous was he? What did he seem like? What sort of life did he lead outdoors the jail? Would Panahi acknowledge his voice if he ever heard it once more? What would he do if he did?
Once I ask Panahi whether or not he has a solution for that final query, he shakes his head. He isn’t thinking about that form of hypothesis. “Once I obtained out of jail, from the second I stepped out, I couldn’t cease eager about the fellows I’d left behind,” he mentioned.
He means it nearly actually. In a video of his launch from Evin in 2023, Panahi is surrounded by pals and reporters, his again to the jail gate. When requested how he feels, he says, “How can I be proud of all these folks nonetheless behind that wall?” Panahi spoke for a number of minutes concerning the pals he made inside, the teachings he discovered, and the solidarity that sustained them.
That spirit hasn’t modified. “All my ideas and issues have been about doing one thing for them,” he mentioned. “Making movies is the one factor I understand how to do. Other than that, I used to be additionally looking for a strategy to manage the chaos in my head, to offer form to all of the ideas and emotions I carried with me out of jail.”
“I’m a social filmmaker, and for all these months, these guys have been my social life. It was solely pure that the folks I met there ended up changing into inspirations for my characters.”
Panahi in Taxi. Jafar Panahi Productions through Kino Lorber
Because the Nineties, Panahi has been a central determine within the post-revolutionary new wave of Iranian cinema. He adopted within the footsteps of his mentor, Abbas Kiarostami, the towering determine of worldwide artwork cinema recognized for his gradual, melancholic movies. Panahi tailored this new cinematic language however shifted his focus from the agricultural landscapes Kiarostami favored to the city backdrop of Tehran.
Beginning with The White Balloon (1995), Panahi has established himself as a number one practitioner of what movie theorists name non-cinema—in different phrases, movies that resist the conventions of mainstream cinema. Movie scholar William Brown regards non-cinema as a filmmaker’s approach of foregrounding what conventional cinema excludes or hides from view—every part that forestalls movie from changing into a profit-making machine.
Non-cinema movies might shoot low-quality pictures with an affordable digicam or inadequate lighting. Their narratives may be nonlinear or characteristic non-actors in lead roles. Over time, these supposed insufficiencies turned a method in their very own proper, particularly for filmmakers within the world south working below technological and political constraints. The ensuing fashion challenges each dominant types of cinema and the ability constructions imbedded inside them.
Panahi’s movie fashion is a cinema of the poor—not as a result of he usually tells tales about working-class and marginalized folks, which he does, however as a result of he positions his filmmaking outdoors the entrenched bond between cinema and capital. “In a world the place movies are made with tens of millions of {dollars},” he as soon as mentioned of The White Balloon, “we made a movie about a bit of lady who desires to purchase a fish for lower than a greenback—that is what we’re attempting to point out.”
Panahi’s tendency to characteristic non-professional actors and narratives that blur the road between documentary and fiction was current in his early movies, but it surely turned all however inevitable after his preliminary imprisonment and the ban on filmmaking that pushed him underground. This Is Not a Movie (2011), its title a direct nod to the concept of non-cinema, Closed Curtain (2013), and Taxi (2015), emerged throughout this era, with Panahi himself usually showing on display screen.
In 3 Faces (2018) and No Bears (2022), Panahi went to East Azerbaijan, a province in Iran’s northwest, the place he was born. There, he filmed in distant villages removed from the eyes of safety forces. But even these works, conceived as inventive methods to evade restrictions, retained a documentarian edge—sense of entrapment that mirrored his years of imprisonment.
It Was Simply an Accident marks a big departure from Panahi’s non-cinema strategy. Although he’s usually cited as a number one practitioner of non-cinema, he’s ambivalent concerning the time period. He insists that It Was Simply an Accident is nearer to the form of movie he has all the time wished to make. His experiments with non-cinema, he defined, have been pushed by necessity fairly than aesthetic selection—merely methods to maintain creating below not possible constraints.
“After the home arrest,” Panahi mentioned, “I used to be in absolute shock. All the pieces I did needed to contain me someway, as a approach of constructing sense of my very own scenario. My buddy [Mojtaba] Mirtahmasb came visiting with a digicam, and we began taking pictures, constructing a narrative as we went, and referred to as it This Is Not a Movie. Then I started questioning how I might make a residing if I couldn’t make motion pictures, and the one factor that got here to thoughts was driving a taxi. However being who I’m, I knew I’d put a digicam in it, so that concept turned a movie. In these works, my most important concern was to point out that there’s all the time a approach out.”
The removing of the ban on Panahi’s filmmaking technically allowed him to lastly return to the streets of Tehran to movie with out fearing a raid on his set. Nonetheless, he must submit his script to the Ministry of Tradition—primarily a censorship workplace—and procure a license for taking pictures. The story he wished to inform would by no means cross the censors, so he filmed it underground as a substitute.
Within the absence of direct strain and fixed surveillance, Panahi not felt the necessity to seem as a personality or to make the act of filmmaking a central theme. That shift allowed the digicam to shed the self-reflexivity that outlined so a lot of his earlier movies. As an alternative, Panahi settled into the classical position of the filmmaker. “In making It Was Simply an Accident,” he mentioned, “for the primary time in years, I obtained to return to the place I’ve all the time wished to be: behind the digicam.”
A movie nonetheless from It Was Simply an Accident.Jafar Panahi Productions, Les Movies Pelléas, Bidibul Productions, Pio & Co, and Arte France Cinéma
In Taxi, a younger movie scholar asks Panahi, taking part in a taxi driver, for recommendation. He’s struggling to give you an authentic thought for his ultimate venture. Regardless of having watched numerous movies and browse many books, he’s caught. “These tales are already written, these motion pictures are already made,” Panahi’s character tells him. “You’ve obtained to get out of the home.”
It’s a becoming piece of recommendation that resonates all through Panahi’s physique of labor. In his movies, characters not often keep indoors. They’re continuously in movement—operating just like the little lady in The White Balloon, strolling like the ladies in The Circle (2000), driving a motorbike like Hossein in Crimson Gold (2003), or driving by way of the streets just like the characters in It Was Simply an Accident. Panahi’s characters by no means have the posh of leisurely commentary. They’re all the time in pursuit of one thing pressing, usually as a matter of survival.
It’s tough to think about one other Iranian filmmaker whose work so vividly charts the evolution of Tehran itself—its shifting structure, its social tensions, its mild and noise. Watching his movies from the Nineties to immediately is like watching Tehran develop each older and youthful, extra crowded, extra wounded, and extra alive.
In It Was Simply an Accident, we see a brand new Tehran, reshaped by the 2022 Lady, Life, Freedom motion, since which many ladies not abide by obligatory hijab guidelines. The movie unfolds largely from inside a van, town glimpsed by way of home windows. Nonetheless, its transformation is unmistakable. For these of us in exile who haven’t returned since that rebellion, seeing the ladies characters with out the hijab is electrifying, particularly when contrasted with Panahi’s earlier movies.
Panahi informed me he by no means a lot selected to shoot outdoor as being pushed there. A part of it got here from his obsession with capturing city actuality in its most genuine kind. However the constraint of the obligatory hijab was a bigger issue, since filmmakers are prohibited from displaying girls with out one onscreen. “A lady sitting in her room carrying a headband—it’s simply not plausible,” Panahi mentioned. “Neglect about censorship. It destroys the believability of the film.”
In some ways, Iranian cinema has all the time thrived on these obstacles. What appeared like a seemingly insurmountable restriction gave rise to an aesthetic innovation, and over time, these workarounds turned the inspiration of a particular cinematic language. Panahi’s movies are a testomony to this—born out of necessity, but charged with the urgency of a filmmaker decided to seize a altering world inside extraordinarily tough circumstances.
Panahi has all the time insisted that he’s not a political filmmaker however a social one. To him, political cinema carries preconceived notions about characters based mostly on their beliefs, set inside a framework the place good and evil are simply distinguishable. Social cinema, in contrast, just isn’t thinking about characters with clear-cut morality.
But, within the Iranian context, Panahi’s movies inevitably carry political weight. There’s a standard thread operating by way of his physique of labor: the powerless striving to achieve energy. Panahi’s characters relentlessly seek for small methods to govern the system, bend the principles, and carve out house for themselves in a society that leaves little room for freedom. None has the ability to stage a rise up. Their resistance is quieter, extra intimate. They discuss their approach into locations the place they don’t seem to be welcome, or out of conditions by which they’re trapped. They drag their ft at work, sabotage petty injustices, or break legal guidelines in minor but significant methods. In a rustic the place the boundaries of permissible conduct are slender and the faintest trace of collective dissent is crushed, such small gestures tackle outsized significance.
Panahi’s cinema is filled with these moments: the ladies smoking—an act policed in public life—in The Circle; the little lady in The Mirror (1997) who tears the faux solid off on her arm, appears to be like into the digicam, and declares she doesn’t wish to act anymore; the younger girls in Offside (2006) sneaking into Tehran’s Azadi Stadium to observe a soccer match; the lady in 3 Faces who fakes her suicide to lure a well-known actress to her distant village and safe a path to college.
After his first imprisonment, when he was below home arrest, Panahi prolonged that very same spirit of resistance to his personal profession. The straightforward act of constructing This Is Not a Movie, which was smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive, turned each a creative and political assertion—declaration that even inside confinement, creation and defiance are attainable.
In It Was Simply an Accident, the desk is turned. For the primary time in Panahi’s cinema, the powerless acquire the prospect to subjugate the highly effective. By sheer coincidence, the captor turns into captive, and the torturer finds himself on the mercy of the tortured. On this sense, the movie might mark a brand new part in Panahi’s profession. His lifelong concern has been to point out how the oppressed carve out house for resistance in a repressive system. Right here, he poses a extra unsettling query: What if those that have been dominated now maintain the means to dominate? Or, to place it in political phrases, what may the world after the Islamic Republic seem like?
“In interviews, I’m continuously requested about revenge and forgiveness and all that,” Panahi informed me. “However these aren’t my issues right here. … What I’m actually eager about is the longer term. The query I ask is that this: Will this cycle of violence proceed? Are we going to execute everybody who labored for this regime and find yourself in the identical gap once more? That’s my query.”
Not that he’s impartial: Panahi is cautious to maintain his political preferences out of his newest movie, however he has made clear his dedication to nonviolence and his admiration for practitioners of it, together with his fellow Evin prisoners Farhad Meysami, the political activist recognized for his near-death starvation strike expertise, and Saeed Madani, the sociologist who held strolling lectures concerning the historical past and ideas of nonviolence for different inmates within the jail courtyard.
The query Panahi poses concerning the future is on the minds of many Iranians, irrespective of their political opinions. It’s a onerous query, if solely as a result of it’s rooted in hypotheticals, but pressing all the identical. To start to reply it requires an lively, collective creativeness, a willingness to suppose collectively about what justice may imply earlier than it’s too late.
Cinema, at its greatest, generally is a software for that form of shared reflection. And Panahi, who has stored his finger on the heartbeat of Iranian society for greater than three many years, is uniquely positioned to assist do this, particularly if he’s allowed to return to the place he has all the time wished to be: out on the road, behind the digicam.
That may be a huge “if” in Iran immediately. Certainly, earlier this month, the Iranian authorities sentenced Panahi in absentia to at least one 12 months in jail and a two-year ban on journey outdoors Iran over his supposed “propaganda actions.”
This hasn’t rattled Panahi. When requested concerning the new sentence, he indicated that he would return to Iran after wrapping up his Oscar marketing campaign subsequent 12 months. “I’ve just one passport. It’s the passport of my nation, and I want to preserve it,” he mentioned on the Marrakech Worldwide Movie Pageant on Dec. 4. “My nation is the place I can breathe, the place I can discover a motive to dwell, and the place I can discover the power to create.”
Tehran isn’t shy about utilizing most pressure and bare violence to silence dissent among the many basic inhabitants. However towards somebody like Panahi—an internationally celebrated artist—it wages a struggle of attrition. He’s repeatedly summoned, banned from filmmaking or touring, jailed for a couple of months right here, a 12 months there. For most individuals, this technique works. It exhausts them into give up.
Panahi has proved unusually resilient. Every time he’s arrested, he emerges louder and braver. Every time he’s barred from making movies, he makes one underground, sharper and extra scathing than something that got here earlier than. On this 20-year marathon between Panahi and the Islamic Republic, he has outlasted many judges and interrogators. This time might be no totally different.
