The Iranian government told director Jafar Panahi he could no longer make movies after his 2010 arrest on charges of anti-government propaganda. Placed under house arrest, the director kept filming anyway. The next year, he released This is Not a Film , a contemplative documentary of his experience trapped in his home. Each film Panahi clandestinely produced in the last decade, from Taxi (2015) to No Bears (2022), forms a series of stark reflections—dispatches from a filmmaker caught between devotion to his homeland and dread of its regime.

It Was Just an Accident —the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes—fine-tunes Panahi’s language into a narrative that dissects the imprint of political trauma on individuals. Filmed with secret cameras and a skeleton crew in the stree

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