It Was Just an Accident is the latest in a string of films from a director who officially does not make them. Iranian Jafar Panahi was sentenced to a 20 year ban on making films in his homeland in 2010. Since then he’s made six features, all in Iran. Among them, This Is Not a Film, a pointed “fuck you” to the authorities shot in his apartment under house arrest. And the equally ingenious Taxi Tehran, in which Panahi drove about Tehran in a taxi, filming his interactions with people he picked up.
His latest film continues the trend. Shot on the hoof, with a tiny cast and crew, using a van as his set, location vehicle and shield from prying eyes, it’s the story of a mechanic – Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) – who works at a little garage where, one day, a guy pulls in with wife and daughter. Eghbal has hit something on the road – a dog maybe – and his van is damaged. Vahid’s little garage is not really equipped to sort Eghbal out, but he does enough to send him on his way, fairly sure that he recognises him. Eghbal, Vahid is fairly certain, is the man who tortured him in prison. Next morning Eghbal heads to a proper garage, unaware that Vahid is on his tail.
Panahi interestingly starts his story off with Eghbal, wife and daughter rather than Vahid. So we cling to Vahid’s uncertainty about Eghbal’s true identity perhaps more than we should. Panahi confuses sympthies even further when Vahid decides to jump Eghbal and drive him out to the desert to bury him. Eghbal pleads that Vahid has the wrong man (and Ebrahim Azizi’s convincing performance as Eghbal discombobulates even further).
Uncertainty is the currency. Vahid never got a proper look at his torturer in prison but reckons the cadence of Eghbal’s peg leg is familiar. But he needs real proof. More generous than the regime that tortured him, he heads off on what’s essentially a road trip, contacting old prison acquaintances hoping to get a watertight identification, with Eghbal in the back of the van, often drugged into unconsciousness. Salar (George Hashemzadeh) isn’t sure and so sends Vahid on to Shiva (Mariam Afshari), who’s in the middle of photographing a wedding rehearsal. Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), the bride-to-be, turns out to be another of the torturer’s victims, so she gets involved, climbing into the van with Shiva and groom-to-be Majid (Majid Panahi).
A strange farce develops, one half a 1990s-style, desert-set, who’s-zooming-who affair not unlike early Tarantino, the Coens and their imitators. The other Panahi’s usual “state of the Iranian nation” overview. Away from the mullahs and imams, life goes on pretty much as normal.
Screwball comedy featuring a minivan, a torturer and his victims – why ever not? Howard Hawks did it with a palaeontologist, an heiress and a leopard in Bringing Up Baby. In similar fashion Panahi piles on the situations, the characters and the absurdity. He also has thoughts to share. About the solidarity of people who have bonded in this grim way. About status accruing to those who were particularly badly treated. And, ultimately, about the power of forgiveness and its ability to trump violence because it looks beyond the past and present to the future.
The big message behind all of Panahi’s pictures is that Iran will endure and that one day this terrible, unjust regime will breathe its last. Until then, a half smile on his face, Panahi takes pot shots, not just at the mullahs but at normal, everyday life – the running joke in this film is about absolutely everyone wanting a kickback, even at the most inappropriate moments. It suggests that, should the regime topple tomorrow, Panahi will also endure.
It Was Just an Accident – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
