Mehrdad Babadi at The Point:
In Taxi (2015), Jafar Panahi stages a brief but haunting moment that, in retrospect, feels like the seed of his most recent film, It Was Just an Accident (2025). Near the end of Taxi, Panahi, playing the taxi driver, becomes visibly unsettled after picking up his friend Nasrin Sotoudeh, the prominent Iranian human rights lawyer and activist. When she asks what is wrong, he replies that he has just heard a voice he thought he recognized: the voice of his interrogator. Sotoudeh tells him that many of her clients report the same experience, a lingering effect of being blindfolded during prison interrogations. The conversation soon shifts elsewhere, almost casually. A decade later, Panahi has returned to that fleeting moment of fear and turned it into the central narrative and emotional core of It Was Just an Accident.
The film made Jafar Panahi only the second Iranian director, after Abbas Kiarostami, to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the most prestigious prize in world art cinema. Yet despite the film’s widespread international acclaim, including Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, reactions within Iranian cultural circles have been divided.
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