Filmmagasinet Ekko :: Interview
Panahi: Must the legacy of violence continue in Iran?

By Niels Jakob Kyhl Jørgensen og Claus Christensen, Filmmagasinet Ekko
02. Mar. 2026 | 10:22

“When truth is crushed in one place, freedom suffers everywhere. No one is safe—not in Iran, not in Europe, not in America.”

“If the world fails to react to this blatant violence today, it is not just Iran, but the entire world that is at stake. If left unopposed, violence becomes normalized. It spreads,” said Jafar Panahi.

For decades, the 65-year-old Jafar Panahi has been a thorn in the side of the Iranian regime and has been imprisoned multiple times. Yet, despite a new sentence, he refuses to leave his homeland. 


Photo | Scott Garfitt

As the clerical regime in Tehran teeters, Jafar Panahi is in the running for an Oscar with his newly released film It Was Just an Accident, which explores the moral dilemmas between justice and forgiveness.

“Put aside your differences! The only thing that matters right now is our country’s unity,” Panahi declared from the stage in late May 2025, upon receiving the Palme d'Or in Cannes for his allegorical revenge thriller, It Was Just an Accident.

It was a historic—and highly charged—moment.

A year earlier, the festival had honored his compatriot, Mohammad Rasoulof, with the Jury Special Prize for The Seed of the Sacred Fig, another film critical of the regime. Three years before that, both men had been imprisoned in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, while thousands of women took to the streets to protest the clerical rule.

In June 2025, just a month after Panahi’s triumph, Evin Prison was damaged during a heavy Israeli bombardment in a 12-day war. For the first time since 1979, this conflict made the prospect of an Iranian regime change feel strikingly near.

On December 28, public discontent exploded into fresh protests. Shopkeepers reacted to the collapsing currency, university students joined the ranks, and demonstrations spread from the capital to multiple cities. The clerical regime responded with brute force, killing thousands.

Now, Israel and the US are attacking again, and the country's Supreme Leader since 1989, the 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been killed along with other central figures in the leadership. Yet, as early as the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 2025, Panahi had already predicted that the days of clerical rule were numbered.

“The history of the Islamic Republic can be divided into a before and an after the 2022 'Woman, Life, Freedom' protests,” he said in a group interview attended by Ekko's correspondent.

“So much has changed in Iran. People have become far more courageous and are making more demands. From every perspective, the system has collapsed: politically, culturally, economically, and environmentally. Only an empty structure remains, still attempting to rule the country with money, violence, and weapons.”

As recently as January 9, he declared in the trade publication Variety that the regime, in reality, had already fallen.

“When a regime like Iran's reaches this point, no one can predict how long it will take. It could be a year, a month, a week. But it will fall,” the director stated.

A thorn in the side

When a regime falls, the ultimate question arises: What should the judicial reckoning look like? It is precisely this dilemma that It Was Just an Accident revolves around.

An auto mechanic believes he recognizes his former prison torturer and, to be absolutely sure before enacting his revenge, assembles a motley jury of traumatized former cellmates.

Some demand blood. Others plead for forgiveness. As they argue over whether they even have the right man, the film evolves into a moral investigation of how a society can break a cycle of violence that has been passed down through generations.

“The film asks how the future should be shaped. Must violence continue its lineage, or can it be brought to an end? Something has to break if history is not to simply repeat itself. One day, it must stop,” the director said in Cannes.

The sixty-five-year-old Jafar Panahi has been a thorn in the side of the Iranian regime for decades.

His early social-realist dramas were created in the tradition of his mentor, Abbas Kiarostami—the only other Iranian to have won the Palme d'Or. With a sober, humanistic gaze, Panahi depicted life at the bottom of a religiously conservative and strictly patriarchal society.

His debut film The White Balloon (1995), the female portrait The Circle (2000), and the football drama Offside (2006) are pieces of cinematic art that are both provocative and poetic. They made him a prominent figure at international festivals—and a subversive dissident in the eyes of the clerical regime.

While he used his platform abroad to criticize those in power, his films were banned in Iran. Sporadic arrests and harassment by the authorities followed, until 2010 when he was imprisoned alongside Mohammad Rasoulof, among others, and later convicted of propaganda against the regime.

The sentence carried six years in prison and a twenty-year ban on filmmaking, giving interviews, or leaving the country.

Underground Films

Jafar Panahi mounted an artistic defense by making himself the protagonist and the regime's oppression his central subject. In documentaries and hybrid films such as This Is Not a Film (2011), Taxi Tehran (2015), 3 Faces (2018) and No Bears (2022), Panahi appears as the director who is forbidden from directing.

In July 2022, Panahi was arrested again when he went to the prosecutor's office to inquire about his two imprisoned colleagues, Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad. He was the third director to be detained in less than a week. On February 1, 2023, he initiated a hunger strike and was released 48 hours later.

When we met in Cannes, it marked the first time in nearly twenty years that he was personally present at the premiere of one of his films. By then, all of the regime's bans against him had been lifted.

When we met in Cannes, it marked the first time he had attended the premiere of one of his own films in nearly twenty years—and all the regime's bans had finally been lifted.

“At the moment, I have no travel restrictions, and I should no longer have issues making films. However, if you want to shoot a film out in the open, you still need a filming permit. This requires submitting your script to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance,” Panahi explained.

“But of course, I was not about to let them read the script and dictate what I could or could not shoot. So in that sense, nothing has changed in the way I make movies. I went back to underground filmmaking—shooting clandestinely, quickly, and with a very small crew.”

Prison Stories

It Was Just an Accident is also Jafar Panahi's first film since Offside in which he does not appear as an actor. And once again, he can credit the clerical regime for guiding him in a new direction when they sent him back to Evin Prison in 2022–23.

“A small part of the film tells my own story, but most of it is built on stories I heard in prison. During my first imprisonment, I was held in isolation with only two or three other inmates. This time, I was in a ward with 300 to 400 prisoners, 30 of whom were political prisoners,” he explained.

“Five or ten years ago, I would never have met these people on the street. But because of my experiences, I met them now in prison.”

This encounter inspired him to shape It Was Just an Accident into an allegorical, collective story that draws upon 50 years of political oppression.

"There have been periods of more or less violence, but I brought all the stories together and reimagined them.”

Coincidence or God’s Will

The film begins exactly as one might expect—with an accident.

A small family, consisting of a father, mother, and daughter, is driving along a country road at night when they strike a stray dog. Soon, they are forced to stop at a repair shop. It is here that the mechanic, Vahid, recognizes the father as his former prison torturer.

The story continues to twist and turn as new coincidences throw a wrench into Vahid's desire for revenge. According to Jafar Panahi, a central idea behind the film was to explore how people react when fate plays a trick on them.

“The mother dismisses the tragedy as God's will. But the daughter, with a few razor-sharp words, punctures that ideology: ‘It was you who wasn't careful. What does God have to do with it?’”

The child's question exposes the parents' faith as blind trust in both God and the regime.

The entire film revolves around that discussion. And about this ideology that has brought so many restrictions and enables so many forms of violence. It is a mindset that interferes with everything—from how you dress and how you eat, to absolutely anything.

Silence contributes to the darkness

Both Rasoulof and three of the female actors from The Seed of the Sacred Fig were forced to flee Iran before the world premiere in 2024. Today, they live in exile in Europe, and in Ekko #98, Rasoulof shares the story of his perilous escape.

In December 2025, Jafar Panahi was once again sentenced in absentia. He received one year in prison, a two-year travel ban, and a prohibition on participating in political or social organizations, with the Iranian authorities charging him with “propaganda against the regime.”

Panahi was staying abroad to promote It Was Just an Accident, which is in contention for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film on March 16. Despite the risk of arrest upon returning to Iran, he still plans to go back home.

“I don’t have the heart to adjust to living anywhere other than Iran. I traveled here to France to complete the post-production of It Was Just an Accident, and it was dreadful,” he said during the group interview in Cannes, adding:

“I was longing to return home to Iran. So just imagine how I would feel if I actually moved here.”

He has maintained this stance even after his recent sentencing. In his speech at the European Film Awards in January, he pulled no punches as he condemned the clerical regime's massacres of protesters.

“If the world fails to react to this blatant violence today, it is not just Iran, but the entire world that is at stake. If left unopposed, violence becomes normalized. It spreads,” said Panahi.

“When truth is crushed in one place, freedom suffers everywhere. No one is safe—not in Iran, not in Europe, not in America.”

“As filmmakers and artists, our task is now more difficult than ever. If we are disappointed by politicians, we must, at the very least, refuse to remain silent. For silence in dark times is not neutral. Silence is a contribution to the darkness.”

Women are heroes

Jafar Panahi has not yet reacted publicly to the US and Israeli attacks on Iran and the passing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

However, this past summer, during the Israeli attacks on his homeland, he signed an open letter calling for an end to the war between Iran and Israel and for the Iranian regime to shut down its nuclear program.

He has stated multiple times that regime change in Iran will come from within—from the people—even though international support can undeniably make a difference. Despite being in conflict with the clerical regime for over twenty years, he still does not consider himself brave.

“I don’t feel that I have more courage than all those remarkable women who, time and again, take to the streets without a veil, being harassed, beaten, and arrested—only to do it all over again the next day,” he said in Cannes 2025.

“They are not in the global spotlight the way I am. Everything I do is noticed and appreciated. So, I don’t have more courage than these women. They are in far greater danger.”

(Translated from Danish)