It Was Just an Accident

Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival and freshly nominated for four Golden Globes, IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT marks a powerful return from master filmmaker Jafar Panahi with a searing moral thriller that blends gripping suspense and dark humour with piercing political inquiry. The film follows Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), an unassuming mechanic who has a chance encounter with Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), a man he strongly suspects to be his former sadistic jailhouse captor. Haunted by uncertainty and fear of being mistaken, Vahid enlists several former political prisoners, each bearing their own scars from the same captor, to try and confirm Eghbal's identity. As the bickering group drives around Tehran with the captive, they must confront how far to take matters into their own hands with their presumed tormentor. What begins as a quest for truth becomes a harrowing and savagely comedic confrontation with conscience, forcing the group to reckon with the cost of vengeance and the possibility of mercy. With complex ideas about the fragility of facts and the weight of moral choice, Panahi turns his personal dissonance into a profound and galvanizing work of art.