It Was Just an Accident
aka Yek tasadef sadeh First screened and reviewed in October 2025
Director: Jafar Panahi. Cast: Vahid Mobaseri, Ebrahim Azizi, Maryam Afshari, Hadis Pakbaten, Majid Panahi, Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, Afssaneh Najmabadi, Delnaz Najafi, Georges Hashemzadeh, Omid Reza, Amir Youssefi, Mohsen Maleki, Negin Arbabi, Ali Rastegari, Elmira ziaí Sigaroudi, Sedigheh Saídi, Maliheh Panahi. Screenplay: Jafar Panahi. In Brief:
Hard to imagine improving on start or finish. Middle more dramatically uneven across nervy range of tones.
VOR:⑤
Even if it "just" extended a legendary, newly emboldened director's portfolio, this would be essential. But its value and risk cut deeper.
I'm a little bit unsettled but even more excited that I don't know how to rate this yet! For better and for worse, let's call this an object lesson in how an artist who has worked almost exclusively under scenarios of high-stakes constraint suddenly negotiates an experience of being markedly less encumbered. For the first time in at least a decade, via a combination of loosened personal punishment and a broader upsurge of public defiance across Iran, Jafar Panahi is either freer or even more reaolved to howl out what used to be communicable only slantwise or surreptitiously or, early on, through the mouths of babes. This shouldn't at all be confused with Panahi having an easy time or a respite from worry on the European-financed It Was Just an Accident. The shoot in Tehran entailed plenty of pressure, if less persistent or totalizing than what This Is Not a Film or Closed Curtain were withstanding. And as the film makes more than clear, whatever we may think we've escaped by the skin of our teeth almost always keeps pursuing us.
Every few years, Panahi has reinvented his creative approach and theorical style, by varying ratios of necessity and curiosity. While I'm *of course* celebrating Panahi's long overdue disentanglement from the cruelest, most absolute restriction, parts of It Was Just an Accident, especially in the second and third of its three acts, seemed less fully shaped than I'd expected, as if the relative liberties of his current era and so much outside support had translated into a palpable loosening of even self-imposed dramatic structures. I might change my mind about that later, as well as my feelings about what results. The movie and my initial response feel disorientingly new, and after a dynamite start (and well before an equally diabolical finish), I sensed variable payoffs of Accident's accumulating choices. But I was also engrossed and energized throughout.
So, watch this space, and even more than that, watch this movie, and the hardest of hard-earned portfolios that preceded it! Grade:B+
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
