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Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi, who has previously been arrested and jailed and whose films have been banned in Iran on multiple occasions, has said “even my closest friends had given up hope that I would ever make films again”.
Panahi was speaking at a press conference before the premiere of his new film A Simple Accident at the Cannes film festival, his first visit in 22 years since bringing Crimson Gold to Cannes in 2003. Panahi was released from jail in Iran in 2023, having been detained in 2022 after attempting to support fellow film-maker Mohammad Rasoulof and subsequently going on hunger strike.
Panahi said: “I said to myself I didn’t know how to do anything else … I can’t change a lightbulb, I can’t work a screwdriver. I don’t know how to do anything except make films.”
A Simple Accident is the first film Panahi has made since his release. A thriller about a car accident that triggers a series of increasingly nightmarish events, the Guardian’s chief film critic Peter Bradshaw described it as Panahi’s “most emotionally explicit film yet: a film about state violence and revenge, about the pain of tyranny that coexists with ostensible everyday normality”. It was produced by French company Les Films Pelléas, shot in Iran and edited in France.
In the run-up to Cannes, Panahi spoke to the Guardian in his first newspaper interview for 15 years, despite being given a 20-year ban on speaking to the media in 2010. In the interview, Panahi said his recent time in jail led directly to the idea for his new film: “I was in a large space with other political prisoners. Some of them had been there for 10 or 15 years. Their experience – their stories, their take on what captivity meant to them – was inspiring. It was like the world opened up to me. Gradually, I had an idea for a film that gathered these pieces together.”
Panahi’s clashes with authorities in Iran date as far back as 2003, when he was arrested at Tehran airport after returning from a film festival in Moscow. In 2010 he was sentenced to six years in jail for allegedly “endangering national security” after the “green movement” protests against Iran’s government. His sentence was later changed to house arrest and restriction of movement.
Panahi continued to make films in defiance of the authorities, including This Is Not a Film from 2011, which was shown at Cannes after being smuggled out of Iran on a USB drive hidden inside a cake, Closed Curtain, shot inside a house with the curtains closed, and which won the Silver Bear for best screenplay at the Berlin film festival in 2013 and Taxi Tehran, entirely shot inside cars, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2015. He also won the best screenplay award at Cannes for 2018’s 3 Faces and the special jury prize at Venice for 2022’s No Bears.
Panahi said at the Cannes press conference that he had no intention of giving up work. “I behave just like other Iranians, I’m not a special case in any matter. The Iranian women are forbidden to go out without a headscarf but still they do so. I’m not doing anything more heroic. As soon as I finish my work here I will go back to Iran, the next day. And I will ask myself what’s my next film going to be.”
