While the Iranian helmer’s latest film may not be his best, it has turned out to be his most crucial to date — all because Panahi is finally able to promote it.
It is often the case that filmmakers and actors don’t get rewarded for their greatest work. Unless you are Meryl Streep or John Ford that is, then you’re basically bestowed awards for all of your work.
But when it comes to someone like Jafar Panahi’s, some of his most beautiful work has gone under the radar awards-wise. Yes, Panahi won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2015 for Taxi, and the Golden Lion in Venice for The Circle in 2000, but films like Offside, The Mirror and This Is Not a Film, and even 3 Faces and No Bears have been adored by the audience — yours truly included — yet never really reached prize-fighting levels.
Now, with his latest It Was Just an Accident, Panahi is slated to conquer it all, even Oscar gold if you ask me. Since his historic win in Cannes earlier this year, where he walked away with the coveted Palme d’Or, and following his world tour — wife and daughter in tow — to festivals and events around the globe, the dark-glasses clad director has become the favorite for an Oscar win, a few BAFTAs and much, much more.
It Was Just an Accident starts off with just that, a simple road mishap which brings a man (Ebrahim Azizi), along with his wife and young daughter, to a remote garage outside Tehran. The man makes an unusual squeak when he walks because of his prosthetic leg and while his car is being repaired, a mechanic recognizes that sound. Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) believes it is the sound of his tormentor, from the days he was jailed by the government as a political prisoner, blindfolded and tortured. But he’s unsure and up to that point, Panahi has been feeding us, the audience, a mixture of (mis)information which could mean the peg legged man is, or isn’t that torturer. It’s a fascinating insight into how many non-verbal clues people drop, even in a simple situation like a car trip with their family.
Aided by a group of former prisoners, who come together in the most unusual of circumstances, Vahid travels with the over-excitable Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), Ali (Madjid Panahi) and Shiva (Mariam Afshari) through the streets of Tehran, unbelievably free to carry their bounty in the back of their truck. Their own encounter with the authorities come when two security guards question their choice of location for wedding photos. Because, yes, the group includes a bride and groom and their photographer, just to make the whole setting more absurd.
What makes a winning film for me is its power to change minds. At the heart of Panahi’s latest work is a message — not about forgiveness vs. revenge, as someone from the audience asked the Iranian auteur during a masterclass at this year’s Rome Film Festival. Panahi quipped back, in Farsi then translated into Italian, that the film doesn’t question that, rather it is a pondering on whether we will be able to break the cycle of violence, once that has kicked off. Panahi spoke at length of making “social films with political themes,” and explained that he likes to work within social cinema because “there are absolute bad guys and absolute good guys in social cinema, whereas political cinema is always about good vs. bad.”
And the simple answer to whether we can break the cycle of violence
, at this point in our world history, seems to be no. From the Israelis, who are traumatized Jews from WWII and have turned into tormentors for their Palestinian neighbors, to the Afghani, from the Yemenis to the Saudis, this is a cycle of never ending violence which only takes up more and more space. The characters in Panahi’s story are searching for redemption, in their lives but also from their tormentors/victims. They are stuck in a circle of madness that has no end, just a repeat, until their end, their demise.
As an interesting aside, when I walked out of the screening in Rome — I had purposely waited to watch It Was Just an Accident during a special moment in time, not in the midst of Cannes madness — I heard a father tell his son, behind me, that Vahid had been a victim of the “Shah’s guards.” That simple mistake made me realize that perhaps we are doomed to keep repeating the mistakes of our past, if we don’t learn our world history correctly and begin caring about our brothers and sisters in the East as much as we care about our seat mates in a cinema in Europe.
Or even more so, I dare say.
It Was Just an Accident was filmed surreptitiously by Panahi, who is still forbidden from making films by the Iranian authorities. To get around the restrictions, the helmer used a limited crew, some non-professional actors and filmed secretly in remote locations. As a result, of course the film is not the official Iranian entry to the Best International Feature Film category at this year’s Academy Awards, instead being submitted by France, which co-produced the film through Philippe Martin for Les Films Pelléas. The post production work was also done in France.
And if you’re wandering about the video above, it is of the song playing on the radio in the car, at the start of the film. The song that bears so many hints and causes so much to come. It Was Just an Accident, but even a simple wrong turn can bring about a seismic change.
Let’s hope the next seismic change is for the better.
Images courtesy of the Rome Film Festival, used with permission.