When Jafar Panahi‘s “It Was Simply an Accident” debuted on the 2025 Cannes Movie Competition, it was the fruits of a brutal journey. The Iranian filmmaker has been banned from filmmaking (although it seldom stopped him) and imprisoned a number of occasions for opposing his house nation’s authorities, most not too long ago in 2022, when he needed to depend on others to learn messages on his behalf at world movie festivals that screened his movie “No Bears.”
He was ultimately launched following a starvation strike in February 2023, and returned to work on a blistering ethical dilemma movie about an Iranian man who kidnaps the person who as soon as tortured him in jail and, together with the person’s different victims, is pressured to decide about whether or not or to not kill him.
“It Was Simply an Accident” premiered to rave evaluations and a Palme d’Or victory on the 2025 Cannes Movie Competition, with critics praising Panahi’s deeply private connection to the fabric and the nuanced ethical dilemma that the movie portrays.
“From the plot description alone, it’s apparent that “It Was Simply an Accident” finds Panahi working in a really totally different register than he needed to whereas ‘banned’ from making movies — a interval that noticed his long-standing penchant for metafiction change into significantly extra pronounced, as he was pressured to make himself the topic of iPhone/camcorder masterpieces like ‘This Is Not a Movie,’” IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote in his Cannes evaluate. “This one nonetheless needed to be shot in secret with a view to skirt authorities approval, but it surely takes nice pleasure in changing the self-reflexivity of Panahi’s unlawful work with a barely extra formal sense of composition, even when it stays unattainable to separate the ultimate product from the private expertise that knowledgeable it.”
“It Was Simply an Accident” is written and directed by Jafar Panahi. The movie stars Vahid Mobasseri, Maryam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten, Majid Panahi, Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, Georges Hashemzadeh, Delmaz Najafi, Afssaneh Najmabadi.
Neon will launch “It Was Simply An Accident” in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 15, with a nationwide rollout to comply with. Watch the trailer beneath.