But for more than a decade, Panahi, winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, the 2025 Palme d’Or, has had little choice. The director of “The White Balloon” and “The Circle” was given a 20-year ban on film production and international travel by Iranian authorities in 2010, following his support for the opposition Green Movement protests. This did not stop him.
Over the years, he found new ways to shoot, edit and smuggle his films – from turning his living room into a movie set (“This Is Not a Film”) to using a car as a mobile studio (in “Taxi,” which won the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlinale).
Now, award-winning filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been sentenced in his absence by the Iranian Revolutionary Court to a year in prison for engaging in “propaganda activities”, ISNA news agency reported on Monday, quoting his lawyer.
The court also imposed a two-year travel ban and barred the director from joining any political or social group. The same day, Panahi was at the Gotham Awards in New York City to receive three awards, including Best Director, for his films. His lawyer told the media that he planned to file an appeal.
Earlier this year, for the first time in two decades, the now 65-year-old filmmaker returned to the Cannes Film Festival to present his latest feature, “It Was Just an Accident,” which premiered to an emotional 8-minute standing ovation.
From jail to palace
Panahi’s path to success has been very easy. Panahi was arrested in July 2022 and detained in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. After nearly seven more months of hunger strike, he was released in February 2023. In a stunning legal victory, Iran’s Supreme Court overturned his original 2010 conviction. Panahi was legally free, but artistically he was still bound by a system to which he refused to submit. “To make a film officially in Iran, you have to submit your script to the Ministry of Islamic Guidance for approval,” he told DW. “This is something I can’t do. I made another secret movie. Again.”
That film, “It Was Just an Accident”, may be Panahi’s most direct confrontation yet with state violence and repression. Shot in secret and featuring female characters in defiance of Iran’s hijab law, the film tells the story of a group of former prisoners who believe they have found the man who tortured them – and must decide whether to get revenge. This 24-hour long drama unfolds like a psychological thriller.
Stylistically, “It Was Just an Accident” is a sharp break from the more contained and largely self-reflexive works Panahi made under his official state ban, but the plot remains firmly autobiographical.
A thriller that digs deep
The film begins with a simple tragedy – a man accidentally hits a dog with his car – and gradually moves towards state-sanctioned cruelty. Wahid (Manaya Mobasseri), a mechanic who has been asked to repair a damaged car, thinks he recognizes the owner as his former tormentor Eghbal, alias Peg-Leg. He kidnaps her with a plan to bury her alive in the desert. But he can’t be sure he’s found the right man, as he was blindfolded during detention. “They kept us blindfolded during interrogations or when we came out of our cells,” Panahi recalls of his time in prison. “The only time you could take the blindfold off was in the toilet.”
Seeking reassurance, the mechanic reaches out to fellow prisoners for confirmation. Soon Wahid’s van becomes filled with victims who want revenge on the man who abused them for nothing more than raising their voice against the authorities. There’s a bride (Hadis Pakbatan) who abandons her wedding to go after the man who raped and tortured her, accompanied by her wedding photographer and former prisoner Shiva (Mariam Afshari). There’s Hamid (Mohammad Ali Ilyasmehr), who is so traumatized and angry by his experience that he doesn’t care whether the man they’ve captured is the right man or not; He just wants revenge. Of all intelligence officers serving under the regime he says, “Even dead, they are a curse to humanity.”
As the group debates retribution versus nonviolence, along with brutal descriptions of the beatings and torture they undergo, Panahi includes sly moments of humor and touches of the absurd. The captors meet Eghbal’s family, including his heavily pregnant wife, and suddenly find themselves taking her to the hospital to give birth. Later, as is tradition in Iran, Wahid goes to a bakery to buy pastries for everyone.
Panahi says, “All the characters you see in this film are inspired by conversations I had in prison, by stories that people told me about the violence and the brutality of the Iranian government, violence that has continued for more than four decades now.” “In a way, I’m not the one who made this film. It’s the Islamic Republic who made this film, because they put me in jail. Maybe if they want to stop us from being so subversive, they should stop putting us in jail.”
Film making is the only option
Despite a career defined by resistance, Panahi says he’s just doing what he knows. “During my 20-year ban, even my closest friends had given up hope that I would ever make films again,” he said at the Cannes press conference for “It Was Just an Accident.”
“But people who know me know I can’t change a lightbulb. I don’t know how to do anything except make movies.”
That single-minded dedication helped him progress even at the lowest level.
“I remember just before I was given a very heavy sentence of 20 years, banned from making films and travelling, and I thought: ‘What will I do now?’ For a while, I was really upset,” he recalls. “Then I went to my window, I looked up and I saw these beautiful clouds in the sky. I immediately got my camera. I thought: ‘This is not something they can take away from me, I can still take pictures of the clouds.’ Those photographs were later exhibited at the Center Pompidou in Paris… There’s no way they could stop me from making films. If cinema is really sacred to you, something that gives meaning to your life, then no regime, no censorship, no authoritarian system can stop you.”
No deportation, no migration
While many Iranian filmmakers have fled into exile — including Panahi’s close friend Mohammad Rasoulof, director of the Oscar-nominated “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” who now lives in Berlin — Panahi says he has no plans to join them. “I was completely unable to adjust to another society,” he says. “I had to stay in Paris for three and a half months for post-production and I thought I was going to die.”
He explained that filmmaking in Iran is a community act of reform and faith. “At 2 p.m., I can call a colleague and say: ‘That shot needs to be longer.’ And he’ll come with me and we’ll work all night. You can’t work like this in Europe. “I have no relation.”
Edited by: Brenda Haas
This article was updated by Sarah Huckle on December 2, 2025, to reflect the arrest of Jafar Panahi.
<a href