This screening is sold out. We will start an in-person waitlist one hour before the screening in case we are able to release last-minute tickets.
In 2022, filmmaker Jafar Panahi—one of Iran’s greatest living artists—was arrested and detained for seven months. The arrest was connected to his prior conviction for “propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” which resulted in a six-year prison sentence and a 20 year filmmaking ban. We all know that Panahi found ingenious ways to flout the ban over the years, creating incredible works brimming with his indomitable personality (including two former VTIFF openers, This Is Not a Film and Taxi). In It Was Just an Accident, his Palme d’Or-winning triumph, he’s as piercingly political as ever while also embracing white-knuckle genre filmmaking. Shot in secret without permits—often inside cars and without lights to avoid detection—Panahi’s economical filmmaking makes this thriller all the more taut in its telling. In this morality play, a group of former prisoners—a brilliant cross-section of Iranian society—think they have captured the intelligence officer who tortured them while incarcerated. But none of them is absolutely certain that it’s him, so they try to prove their suspicions beyond a shadow of a doubt. It’s easy to see Panahi’s own experience and trauma reflected in this parable, but what’s remarkable is that his revenge fantasy is animated not by rage but by the group’s enduring humanity. Panahi is even able to maintain his signature sense of humor as the temperature rises. Fellow filmmaker and agitator Mohammad Rasoulof called Panahi’s Palme win a “powerful blow to the machinery of repression in the Islamic Republic.” How often can you ascribe such weighty significance to those golden laurels? ~OO