Un Simple Accident by Anthony Ertle

The first Jafar Panahi film I ever saw was This Is Not a Film, back in 2016. I was a senior in college and just starting to take film seriously. I had enrolled in a class called World Cinema: a course built around the international greats. Watching for the first time was thrilling but intimidating. I’d grown up fascinated by the art a country would ban, the kind of work that must have meant something powerful if an entire government tried to suppress it. I thought of books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer or old Hollywood pre-Code films that tested the limits of what could be shown on screen. Seeing This Is Not a Film, Filmmaker Jafar Panahi is under house arrest, calmly dissecting his passion for cinema, and learning that the film had been smuggled to Cannes on a flash drive hidden in a cake. All for a movie. It was unbelievable. For the first time, I understood that some films carry a weight beyond art or entertainment. They exist because the filmmaker refuses to be silent. Watching Panahi sit with his pet iguana or talk to his neighbor amid civil unrest, I realized his defiance was as cinematic as any of the greats before him. 

Jafar loves the “one take.” I can’t help but compare Panahi’s “one take” to be a certain tribute to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky worked in the Soviet Union, where every script, edit, and festival submission required government approval. Andrei Rublev (1966) was shelved for years due to its religious and violent imagery. Stalker (1979) faced endless production troubles, and the negatives were allegedly destroyed by lab mishandling (I speculate sabotage). Tarkovsky eventually left the USSR in exile, in order to keep making movies like Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986) in Italy and Sweden. Panahi, born in Mīāneh, Iran faced an even more literal prohibition. After The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006), Panahi was banned from filmmaking for 20 years in 2010 from his home country. Hence, This Is Not a Film (2011) was made under house arrest. The film was then smuggled to Cannes on a flash drive hidden in a cake. Yada yada yada. No Bears (2022) was filmed in secret near the Turkish border before Panahi’s imprisonment.

These long, uninterrupted takes are not the Hollywood spectacle but a spiritual adventure. Tarkovsky called it ‘sculpting in time’, using the long take to capture time as a living presence. The camera often moves slowly through landscape to reveal inner states of the characters, about the filmmaker themself, and about the spectators watching. These moments emphasize truth, patience, and confinement. These filmmakers stand for a resistance to censorship, while the camera’s refusal to cut becomes a refusal to compromise with repression. These films are deeply autobiographical, filled with memories and family imagery. Exploring faith, guilt, and the soul’s endurance under alienation. Films that make you turn to yourself in a similar way. These are filmmakers that make films where creation becomes a moral act of survival. They use cinema to reveal the depths of our soul. They’re using cameras as a moral witness, putting the audience at risk of watching. 

Jafar’s latest, It Was Just an Accident, has a scene of a one take where his characters argue over the dilemma for which they are in. The camera poses the question: what do you do when you have the chance to take revenge against your oppressors? Each character embodies a different response.  One character seeks immediate violence and the camera follows him back and forth across a wide landscape, where he argues with other victims who demand the justice be measured and exact. As an audience member, I relate most to Ali, the character who wasn’t really oppressed to begin with. The groom to be as he serves as the audience’s proxy. He is present, compassionate, but desperate to move on and to escape. Wouldn’t it be easier if we just left this behind and got married? How do you leave behind the trauma and just continue on your path? We learn that his fiance was assaulted, and every character bears a similar scar; their own humiliation and their own form of brutality. 

Some films can be a distraction from reality, and that’s ok. In fact, I think that’s good. But then they are the films that take you through the challenges of a filmmaker’s personal journey. Those films that showcase suffering become a passageway for spectators to look into their own selves. Those are the films that give us the privilege to see ourselves in the theater. Those are the films that become striking to the soul. Those are the films that are so important that they can only be composed in secret; they function as life or death. The audience is left with a choice even: to do or to die. Jafar Panahi is incredibly motivating to me for his efforts and desires to tell stories. I hope to do some of the same. 

Winner of the 2025 Palme d’Or, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident is the film of the year.