IFFK 2025: Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident pulses with a rare moral force and authenticity

By now, we have become so used to seeing Jafar Panahi being the protagonist in his own films that it feels odd when he does not appear in It Was Just an Accident, being screened in the World Cinema category at the 30th International Film Festival of Kerala. But one can feel the man’s presence in the sheer anger that pours out of each of the four characters who are raring to have a go at a man who tormented them in the past.

It is no ordinary man whom they have held in captivity. The man stands for the all powerful State which has clamped down on their freedoms. Yet, they are unsure if he is really the person behind all their troubles. The film begins rather innocuously, with Eghbal and his family riding home at night. The ride is mostly joyful, except for an incident involving a dog, which his pregnant wife brushes off as ‘It was just an accident’.

Later, the car develops a snag, forcing them to stop at a workshop, where Vahid, the mechanic, recognises a familiar, eerie sound, created by Eghbal’s dragging prosthetic leg. Those sonic waves bring back the painful memories of the torture that Vahid, as an alleged political dissident, underwent in prison at the hands of a man nick-named ‘Peg Leg’. Hot-headed, probably from the harsh experiences he has undergone in life, Vahid tracks him down the next day and hauls him over to a desert, to be buried alive. But then, Eghbal claims he has thoroughly mistaken him for someone else.

Not one to give up, Vahid drives with the man tied up safely inside his van to find his friends, who have all been victims of his cruelty. The film then opens up with a colourful set of characters, from a wedding photographer to the wedding bride and her fiancé and a man known for his anger and shady deals. We listen to each of them recounting the treatment that they suffered in jail. One then wonders how much of what they recount is from Panahi’s own life, for he has had multiple terms in jail over the past decade and a half.

Despite all their pent up anger, their inherent humanity shines through in a particular situation that elevates the film. It perhaps could also be Panahi’s way of telling us about the nature of the people that the government takes a dislike towards. The humour that shines throughout the film can also come only from such a place.

On the other hand, Eghbal, their tormentor could even be the central character from another recent Iranian movie – the judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, from Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024), a man who will punish anyone who stands against the establishment, even if it is someone from his own family. Incidentally, Rasoulof, who is also facing the wrath of the Iranian regime and is currently in exile, is the jury chairperson at this year’s IFFK.

Unlike the run-of-the-mill revenge dramas, Panahi’s film It Was Just an Accident has more moral force, authenticity and immediacy, considering the real-life experience which informs Panahi’s approach.