Jafar Panahi’s Golden Palm winner It Was Just an Accident is a profoundly necessary humanist work
Chama Al Houari (f. 2002) is an aspiring filmmaker from Morocco and Montages’ editorial assistant. She is currently living in Oslo, and is passionate about film history and how movies reflects the world.
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Cannes 2025: The morning after its evening premiere, I was handed a ticket to a morning screening of It Was Just an Accident. I hurried to the Grand Théâtre Lumière and took my seat just as the film began. After many difficult sittings, occasional snoozes, and disappointments I wished upon a star that this unanticipated Iranian film would redeem my early morning. Little did I know, I was about to watch the Palme D’or winner.
I was immediately struck by the elegant simplicity of the first few scenes. A seemingly ordinary family runs over a dog on their way home, and stops at a shop to fix their car. From this point onward, the spiral of unfortunate events unravels. Before we begin to understand why, the ordinary family man, Eghbal, is kidnapped by a mechanic named Vahid. Director Jafar Panahi leaves us dazed until we begin to understand the tragic history which led to this inevitable scenario. Therein lies the initial brilliance of the film, the very structure of the story weaves the ordinary into the fated. The intrigue begins long after the tragedy has occurred – and exactly where the aftermath gives way to contemplation.
This man is revealed to be more than a husband and father – possibly a former torturer involved in brutal acts of violence against dissidents of the Islamic state. Eghbal is recognized for the eerie and unmistakable sound of his prosthetic leg – the sound of punishment. Vahid instinctively captures him, however, doubt entails. Can he really be sure that this is the man who caused his suffering? Can he really enact revenge with this pressing doubt? Naturally, he seeks out other former prisoners to make matters clear.
It is in this uncertainty that the meditative core of the film makes itself known. Panahi explores the layered complexities that surround the eternal question of revenge through the vehicle of clashing personalities – each with their own position on the matter, informed by individual experience. We are introduced to Golrokh – a bride to be, her groom, Shiva the wedding photographer, and Hamid her ex lover. Caught by Vahid on the eve of their wedding and thrust into a high stakes revenge arc, the situation calls for more than a few hilarious moments. The characters themselves marvel at the absurdity of their predicament.
Shiva wisely attempts to avoid involvement, but to no avail – Golrokh is more than happy to cast aside her wedding for the sake of sweet revenge. They are then joined by Hamid, who is also out for blood.
Throughout the film only Vahid softens his stance while the others maintain theirs – up until the final run of the film. I was particularly impressed by Golrokh and Shivas’ depictions, bold and full of rage; they never once fall into the stereotype of the soft-hearted woman there only to appease the vengeful.
More broadly, the ethical dilemma at play is never postured, it is born out of urgency. There are no polished grand monologues. The voices never echo the sterility of archetypes, they are distinct, flawed, and painfully human. It is through this delicate exploration of the shared human condition that Panahi’s writing becomes a triumph of subtlety.
But rather than just being an exercise in subtlety, Panahi wields this restraint as a necessary tool for honest storytelling. Here, ambiguity is not merely an aesthetic or cinematic virtue, it reflects a reality too complex and too raw to be loudly stated. In its antecedents, the ethical question of revenge has too often taken a moral angle. Beyond its technical prowess, what makes It Was Just an Accident a remarkable addition to the genre is its very abstention from overt moralizing – despite the tragedy of it all.
Panahi never answers the question, frankly I don’t even think Panahi is interested in the specific question of whether or not revenge is legitimate. He refuses to grant any one of his characters the comfort of moral high-ground, not those who call for walking away nor those who demand justice.
Instead, we are presented with an imperfect yet ongoing conversation that only complexifies as the plot unfolds. Even our relation to the perpetrator Eghbal muddies, as we are faced with his pregnant wife and sweet young daughter – Panahi dares to humanize even the enemy. What’s left is a reality that evades clear resolution, a world where bad men have innocent children, where lives are erased without purpose, and where vengeance is not condemned – it is an honest human response to senseless suffering.
The film never looks down on this desire; it questions whether any act can truly and finally alleviate the pain of loss. Beyond right and wrong, further than ethics and rage, what I felt was a crushing grief for all that cannot be undone. For the fragility of life, for the unpredictable nature of events, and mostly for the human cost.
In this way the film earns its title It Was Just an Accident, and how are we to retrace the beginnings of tragedy? Like the film, wherever we may start is only a point far beyond where the initial harm was done. Panahi exposes that beyond revenge, grief is the equalizer, one of the few non-partisan human experiences.
How Jafar Panahi was able to write a film so close to the vein of his experience while taking us through the full spectrum of human emotion, with masterful restraint, a lightness of heart, and piercing honesty, I will perhaps never know. But boy am I glad he did.
It Was Just an Accident is a monument to the human heart’s ability for grace in the face of brutality. Panahi gives us a profoundly necessary humanist work that doesn’t meet cruelty with moral resolution, but with the dignity of grief.