It Was Just an Accident with Jafar Panahi

Jafar Panahi will join us for special screenings of his Cannes Palme d’Or winning film It Was Just an Accident. Join us for a post-film Q&A following the 7:00pm show, along with the presentation of the Coolidge Impact Award. He will also provide an introduction to the 7:30pm encore. 

The Coolidge Impact Award was created to celebrate a film artist who demonstrates artistic bravery and persistence of vision, and whose work inspires social change. “At the Coolidge, we have long championed the power of cinema to generate empathy and understanding. Now more than ever, we feel it is essential to uplift the voices of film artists who boldly shine a light on vital issues such as injustice, censorship, and political repression. Jafar Panahi has consistently and courageously trained his camera on each of these, and we are honored to celebrate him and his extraordinary new film with our inaugural Coolidge Impact Award,” remarked Katherine Tallman, Coolidge Corner Theatre Executive Director & CEO.

About It Was Just An Accident

In the film, what begins as a minor accident sets in motion a series of escalating consequences when car mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) believes he has encountered the government interrogator who tortured him, but he cannot be certain because he never saw the man’s face. 

Filmed in secret in Iran—where Panahi was banned from making movies by the government 15 years ago—It Was Just an Accident elegantly confronts its characters with entangled questions of suspicion, moral ambiguity, and the meaning of retribution.

About Jafar Panahi

One of the world’s great cinema artists, Jafar Panahi has been crafting self-reflexive works about political, artistic and personal freedom for the past three decades, despite being banned from filmmaking by the government of his native Iran since 2010. 

Born in 1960 in the city of Mianeh, Panahi began his career with a series of short films and documentaries for Iranian TV, after which he landed a job as an assistant to the renowned Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami. In 1995, he directed his first feature, The White Balloon, co-written with Kiarostami. The film was selected at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, where it won the Caméra d’Or. 

In 2003, Panahi returned to Cannes with the dramatic thriller Crimson Gold, which won the Jury Prize for Un Certain Regard. Initially selected to represent Iran at the Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category, Crimson Gold was ultimately banned by the authorities, preventing it from being shown in Iranian cinemas. With Offside, Panahi once again turned his attention to women’s rights in Iran. Presented at the Berlinale in 2006, the film received the Silver Bear for Best Director. It tells the story of young Iranian women who defy authorities and secretly attend a football match. Offside was also not approved for release in Iran. 

In July 2009, Panahi was arrested for the first time after attending the memorial of a young protester killed during demonstrations following the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was arrested a second time in March 2010 and spent 86 days in Evin Prison before being released on bail. He was invited to serve on the jury at Cannes, but his chair remained symbolically empty for the duration of the festival. He received widespread support from artists and filmmakers around the globe. 

In 2010, Panahi was sentenced to a 20-year ban from directing films, writing screenplays, giving interviews to the press, or leaving Iran, under threat of a six-year prison sentence. The verdict was upheld on appeal in the fall of 2011. Despite these restrictions, he co-directed This Is Not a Film with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. Shot entirely in his apartment, the film captures his daily life as an artist forbidden to work. This Is Not a Film was screened out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2011. 

In 2012, Panahi was awarded the Sakharov Prize by the European Parliament. His daughter accepted the award on his behalf at a ceremony he was unable to attend. That same year, he clandestinely co-directed a new film with Kambuzia Partovi entitled Closed Curtain, which went on to win the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival. In February 2015, he premiered Taxi Tehran at the Berlin Film Festival. It was his first film shot on his own and in public since 2010. The film received the Golden Bear and the FIPRESCI Prize. 

On July 11, 2022, Jafar Panahi was arrested and would not be released until February 3, 2023, after a hunger strike. 2022 is also the year he received the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for No Bears. In 2025, he returned to Cannes with It Was Just an Accident, which was awarded the Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.