Filmmagasinet Ekko :: Interview
Panahi: Will the legacy of violence continue in Iran?

By Niels Jakob Kyhl Jørgensen og Claus Christensen, Filmmagasinet Ekko
02. Mar. 2026 | 10:22

“When truth is crushed in one place, freedom suffers everywhere. No one can be safe – not in Iran, not in Europe, not in America.”

“If the world today does not respond to this blatant violence, it is not only Iran that is at stake, but the whole world. Violence becomes normalized if it is not met with resistance. It spreads” -- Jafar Panahi

65-year-old Jafar Panahi has been a thorn in the side of the Iranian regime for decades and has been in prison several times, but despite a new sentence, he refuses to leave his homeland.


Photo | Scott Garfitt

While the chair is tottering under the clerical rule in Tehran, Jafar Panahi is in the running for an Oscar with  It Was Just an Accident that is out now, which explores the moral dilemmas between justice and forgiveness.

"Put your differences aside! The only thing that matters now is the unity of our country," said Jafar Panahi from the stage when he received the Palme d'Or in Cannes at the end of May 2025 for his allegorical revenge thriller It Was Just an Accident. The moment was historic – and charged. 

A year earlier, the festival had honored his compatriot Mohammad Rasoulof with the Special Jury Prize for his equally regime-critical film The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Three years before that, they had both been imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, while thousands of women took to the streets in protest against the clerical regime.

In June 2025, a month after Panahi’s triumph, Evin Prison was damaged during a fierce Israeli bombardment in a twelve-day war that, for the first time since 1979, made the idea of ​​an Iranian regime change seem surprisingly close.

On December 28, discontent exploded into new protests. Shopkeepers reacted to the weakened currency, university students joined in, and demonstrations spread from the capital to several cities. The clerical regime responded with brutal force, killing thousands.

Now Israel and the US are attacking again, and the country's supreme leader since 1989, the 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been killed along with other key figures in the leadership. But already at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 2025, Jafar Panahi predicted that the days of clerical rule were numbered.

"The history of the Islamic Republic can be divided into a before and an after the Woman Life Freedom demonstrations in 2022," he said in a group interview in which Ekko's correspondents participated.

"So much has changed in Iran. People have become much braver and are making more demands. From every perspective, the system has collapsed: politically, culturally, economically and environmentally. All that remains is the empty structure that still tries to rule the country with money, violence and weapons."

As late as January 9, he declared in the film magazine Variety that the regime had in fact already fallen.

"When a regime like Iran's gets to this point, no one can predict how long it will take. It could be a year, a month, a week. But it will fall," the director said.

A thorn in the side

When a regime falls, the crucial question arises: What should the legal purge look like? It Was Just an Accident revolves around this very issue.

An auto mechanic believes he recognizes his former torturer from prison and assembles a motley jury of traumatized fellow prisoners to be sure before he exacts his revenge.

Some demand blood. Others advocate forgiveness. While they argue about whether they even have the right man, the film develops into a moral examination of how a society can break a spiral of violence that has been passed down through generations.

“The film asks how the future should be shaped. Should violence continue its inheritance, or can it be brought to an end? Something must be broken if history is not to simply repeat itself. One day it must stop,” said the director in Cannes.

65-year-old Jafar Panahi has been a thorn in the side of the Iranian regime for decades.

His early social realist dramas were created in the wake of his mentor Abbas Kiarostami, the only other Iranian to have won the Palme d’Or. With a sober, humanistic perspective, Panahi depicts life at the bottom of a religiously conservative and strictly patriarchal society.

His debut film The White Balloon (1995), the portrait of women The Circle (2000) and the football drama Offside (2006) are both debate-provoking and poetic cinematic art. They made him a prominent figure at international festivals – and a subversive dissident in the eyes of the clerical regime.

While he spent his speaking time abroad criticizing those in power, his films were banned in Iran. Sporadic arrests and harassment by the authorities followed until he was imprisoned in 2010 along with Mohammad Rasoulof, among others, and later convicted of propaganda against the regime.

The sentence was six years in prison and a twenty-year ban on making films, giving interviews, or traveling outside the country.

Underground Film

Jafar Panahi responded artistically by making himself the main character and the regime's repression his main subject.

In documentaries and hybrid films such as This Is Not a Film (2011), Taxi Tehran (2015), 3 Faces (2018) and No Bears (2022), Jafar Panahi appears as the director who is not allowed to direct.

In July 2022, Panahi was arrested again when he appeared at the prosecutor's office to help his two imprisoned colleagues, Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad. He was the third director to be detained in less than a week. On February 1, 2023, he began a hunger strike and was released 48 hours later.

When we met in Cannes, it was the first time he had attended the premiere of one of his films in almost twenty years. And all the regime's bans had been lifted.

“At the moment I have no difficulty in travelling, and I should have no more problems in making films. But if you want to make films in full public view, you still need permission to film. That means sending your script to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance,” Jafar Panahi said.

“But of course I was not prepared to let them read the script and tell me what I could and could not film. So in that sense there is nothing new in the way I make films. I went back to underground filmmaking and to filming secretly, quickly and with a very small crew.”

Prison Stories

It Was Just an Accident is also Jafar Panahi’s first film since Offside in which he doesn’t star. And again, he can give credit to the clerical regime for showing him a new direction when they sent him back to Evin Prison in 2022-23.

“There’s a bit of the film that tells my own story, but most of it is based on stories I heard in prison. When I was in prison the first time, I was in isolation with only two or three other prisoners. This time I was in a section with 300-400 prisoners, 30 of whom were political prisoners,” he explained.

“Five or ten years ago, I would never have met these people on the street. But because of my experiences, I met them now in prison.”

The meeting inspired him to shape It Was Just an Accident as an allegorical collective story that draws on 50 years of political oppression.

“There have been periods of more or less violence, but I brought all the stories together and re-created them.”

Coincidence or God’s Will

The film starts, as one might expect – with an accident.

A small family with a father, mother and daughter are driving on a country road at night when they hit a stray dog. Soon they have to stop at a repair shop. Here, the mechanic Vahid recognizes the father of the family as his torturer.

The story continues to twist and turn as new incidents put a damper on Vahid’s desire for revenge. According to Jafar Panahi, a key idea behind the film was to explore how people react when fate plays tricks on them.

“The mother dismisses the tragedy as God’s will. But the daughter punctures the ideology with a few, razor-sharp words: ‘You weren’t careful. What does that have to do with God?’”

The child’s question exposes the parents’ faith as blind trust in God and the regime.

“The whole film is about that discussion. And about this ideology that has brought so many restrictions and that enables so many forms of violence. It's a mindset that disrupts everything – from how you dress and how you eat, to everything.”

Silence contributes to the darkness

Both Mohammad Rasoulof and three of the female actors from The Seed of the Sacred Fig had to flee Iran before its world premiere in 2024. Today they live in exile in Europe, and in Ekko #98 Rasoulof talks about his perilous escape.

In December 2025, Jafar Panahi was sentenced in absentia once again. He was given a year in prison, a two-year travel ban, and a ban on participating in political or social organizations, as the Iranian authorities accused him of “propaganda against the regime.”

Panahi was abroad to promote It Was Just an Accident, which is competing for an Oscar for best screenplay and best international film on March 16. Despite the risk of arrest upon returning to Iran, he still plans to return home.

“I don’t have the courage to get used to living anywhere other than Iran. I went here to France to finish the production of 'It Was Just an Accident', and it was horrible,” he said in the group interview in Cannes, adding:

“I longed to return to Iran. So imagine how I would feel if I moved here.”

He has maintained this even after the verdict. In his speech at the European Film Awards in January, he did not hold back when he condemned the clerical regime’s massacres of protesters.

“If the world today does not respond to this blatant violence, it is not only Iran that is at stake, but the whole world. Violence becomes normalized if it is not met with resistance. It spreads,” said Jafar Panahi.

“When truth is crushed in one place, freedom suffers everywhere. No one can be safe – not in Iran, not in Europe, not in America.”

“As filmmakers and artists, we now have a more difficult task than ever. If we are disappointed with politicians, we must at least refrain from being silent. For silence in dark times is not neutral. Silence is contributing to the darkness.”

Women are heroes

Jafar Panahi has yet to publicly respond to the US and Israeli attacks on Iran and the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But this summer, during Israel's attacks on his homeland, he signed an open letter calling for an end to the war between Iran and Israel and for the Iranian regime to shut down its nuclear program.

He has repeatedly said that regime change in Iran will come from within - from the people - although international support can undeniably make a difference. He has been in conflict with the clerical regime for over twenty years, yet he does not consider himself brave.

“I don’t feel like I have more courage than all those remarkable women who go out into the streets without a veil and are harassed, beaten, arrested, and then do it all over again the next day,” he said at Cannes 2025.

“They’re not in the spotlight of the world the way I am. Everything I do is noticed and appreciated. So I don’t have more courage than these women. They’re in far greater danger.”

(Translated from Danish)