It Was Just an Accident

Winning the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Jafar Panahi’s revenge thriller is both a broadside and real-world triumph against authoritarian oppression.

When a traveller with a distinctively squeaky prosthetic leg arrives at his auto-repair shop one night, Vahid is convinced that it’s the officer who tortured him in prison years ago. Although he was always blindfolded when it happened, he’d recognise the sound of that leg anywhere – and so, seizing the opportunity for revenge, Vahid abducts the man and transports him to the desert, intending to bury him alive. But before he can do the deed, Vahid’s conscience halts him: what if he’s kidnapped the wrong person? Over a frenzied 24 hours, he sets out to find other former prisoners who can verify the man’s identity, amassing an unlikely group of co-conspirators along the way, each of whom carries their own motivation for vengeance.

Previously subjected to lengthy filmmaking and international travel bans and forced to film in secret even after his release, Iranian master director Jafar Panahi (No Bears, MIFF 2023) claimed cinema’s most coveted prize at Cannes for this incendiary thriller. Combining pitch-black gallows humour and devastating plot twists with elements of real stories Panahi heard from fellow prison inmates, this rage-filled rallying cry against state-sanctioned censorship and violent oppression courageously interrogates the morality of retribution.

“It’s a beautifully written and executed work … powerful, gripping and generous.” – Little White Lies