From prison to the Palme d'Or: Jafar Panahi's defiant message to the world
When Jafar Panahi attended the Cannes Film Festival with his latest film, It Was Just an Accident, it was the first time the renowned director had been allowed to leave Iran in 15 years. Even after years of prosecutions, house arrest and two spells in prison, he said the most exciting thing about this sudden rush of liberty was being able to see one of his films, which are all banned in his home country, in a cinema. 'Watching the film with other people and telling myself, 'Oh wow, you were able to watch one of your films with other people!' And, of course, seeing the audience finding a rapport.'
An intense rapport, as it turned out: on the closing night of the festival, Panahi was presented with the top prize, the Palme d'Or, by specially invited Cate Blanchett. Introducing the award, jury president Juliette Binoche said cinema and art are 'provocative' and mobilise 'a force that transforms darkness into forgiveness, hope and new life', which was why the jury had chosen Panahi's film.
Predictably, Panahi's persecutors back in Iran didn't see it quite that way; the state television station condemned It Was Just An Accident as 'lies and smearing', while the victory caused a small but fiery diplomatic spat between Iran and France. 'I am not an art expert,' sneered foreign ministry representative Esmaeil Baqaei, 'but we believe that artistic events and art in general should not be exploited to pursue political objectives'.
Like all the films Panahi has made in his years as persona non grata, It Was Just an Accident was shot and edited in secret, without the required official permits. 'I had to work in total secrecy, with only my very close crew being aware of the subject of the film and of the content of the script.' There was no point, he says, in applying for clearance to make what is perhaps his angriest film yet – and his strangest, in that it is a comedy caper about torturers and the tortured.
It follows a garage mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasser), who hears in the garage the uneven footsteps of his former torturer, whom he never saw through his blindfold but whom he knew had an artificial leg. He could never forget the sound of that dragging foot. Vahid becomes judge and jury. What punishment could fit this man's crimes? If, indeed, it was this man. Having kidnapped him, intending to bury him alive in the desert, Vahid starts to have doubts.
Bundling his catch into his van, he goes to consult his friend and mentor, a scholarly bookshop owner, who asks him with some asperity whether he is really up for burying someone alive. But he doesn't want to decide anything; for that, he should ask the photographer who was raped by this man, who turns out to be doing a wedding shoot that day with a couple of other torture victims. Did any of them see their interrogator? No. Bride, groom and photographer join his posse, with a firm ID still no closer.
It Was Just an Accident walks a knife-edge between horror and humour, which Panahi says is a very Iranian approach to the world. 'Iranians really are that way. You will be having a very serious argument about something very difficult and 10 minutes later you're having a joke about it,' he says. 'No political entity has ever been able to rid us of it and, of course, when it is included in a film, it makes the film more real.' The Islamic Republic has tried to stamp out festivals and fun of all kinds, without ever managing it. 'Just like, despite imposing the mandatory headscarf time and again, they haven't been able to stop our very progressive, courageous women.'
Nothing has stopped Panahi, either. Back in 2010, he was sentenced to six years in jail for supporting anti-government protesters and creating 'propaganda against the system'. He served only two months, but he was banned from travelling outside Iran and from making films. His response was to make This Is Not a Film, a polemic on the nature of film-making shot entirely in his home on his iPhone, which made it to international festivals on a USB stick baked into a cake. Tehran Taxi (2015) was shot surreptitiously inside a moving car. It went on, in Panahi's very conspicuous absence, to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
In 2022, he was arrested again when he asked awkward questions about the fate of two other imprisoned filmmakers and, as a consequence, was ordered to serve the rest of his 2010 sentence. He was in prison for seven months, undergoing repeated interrogation sessions, but was released in February 2023, his sentence considered served and the previous travel and work bans lifted. He then set about turning his experience – and the stories he heard from his fellow prisoners, some of whom had been incarcerated for 15 years – into It Was Just an Accident.
Other Iranian filmmakers have seized opportunities such as Cannes to get out of the country for good. Panahi, however, immediately made it clear that he would never leave Iran and was heading back as soon as the festival was over. 'I have no ability to adapt to a new country, a new culture,' he said. 'Many of those outside Iran did not leave of their own volition; they are in an imposed exile. I don't see myself as capable of living outside Iran or courageous enough to do so.' The day after he collected his Palme, Instagram showed his return to Tehran, where a small crowd of well-wishers – including many bare-headed women – were waiting at the airport with a garland of flowers ready to put over his shoulders. He was home.
Somewhat disingenuously, Panahi insists on defining his films as 'social' rather than political. To call them political is a misnomer that is itself politically motivated, he says. 'I think a political film has a very clear attachment to a party, a very specific stance and pursues a specific political agenda, but you will never see an entirely positive or entirely negative character in any of my films,' he says. 'The real problem is the superstructure, the government that turns people into something they are not. What I do in my films is show people the way they are and highlight the circumstances that might have led them to be the way they are.'
This is, for example, the first of his films to show women with their hair uncovered, which he says reflects the fact that when he was released from prison, what struck him was the number of women in public without headscarves. The characters in the film reflect different stances – one who speaks in slogans, another who is more conciliatory – reflecting the real-life characters he met in prison. 'I even allowed an interrogator to speak for himself, and explain his ideology, his aims.' The Iranian authorities, needless to say, take a different view.
Panahi started his film-making career making television and as an assistant director to Abbas Kiarostami. His first film as a director, The White Balloon, was a gentle story of slum children that won the Camera d'Or in Cannes in 1995. The Iranian film authority duly nominated The White Balloon as the country's Oscar entry, then decided it was critical of the regime and banned Panahi from travelling to the United States or speaking to the press. By the time he came to make The Circle, a round of interlocking stories about Iranian women that won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2000, he was officially on the outer. The Circle, along with all his subsequent films, was banned in Iran.
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The experience of interrogation, remembered by various characters in It Was Just an Accident, echoes his own. During his months of imprisonment, he was questioned for hours every day as to why he would make the films he does. He imitates their tirades. ''You're selling out! You're giving your country a bad reputation! You are a traitor!'' A lot of discussion, he says with irony.
Like the people in his film, he is haunted by that disembodied voice. 'When the interrogator has sat you very close to the wall, blindfolded you in such a way that you can only see enough from the corner of your eye to write on a piece of paper and is standing behind you, you do wonder: who is this? What does he look like, how old is he, what does he believe?'
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In theory, Panahi's suspended sentence is now officially served, and he should be free to apply for permission to make films legitimately. 'I think I just did what my sentence required, which was that I was banned from film-making for 20 years,' he says. 'I did 16 years of it; I think they could not renew this sentence as it came to an end.' But that doesn't mean he has been given more latitude. He will continue to film in secret; as he said in an interview with Variety during the festival, the authorities make up laws as they go. Will he be arrested again? Or confined to home? Nothing is certain, except that Jafar Panahi will continue, one way or another, to make films.
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