June 20, 2025
Iranian film director Jafar Panahi has won the Palme d’Or, the premier award given at the Cannes Film Festival, making him only the fourth director in history to win the top award from all three of Europe’s key film festivals.
Panahi won for “It Was Just an Accident,” beating 21 other entries.
d’Or he won this year at Cannes, to go with the top
awards he won in earlier years at the Berlin and
Venice film festivals.
And the win has the regime in Tehran seething as this is Panahi’s most political film yet.
The film is a thriller about a group of former political prisoners who abduct a man they suspect tortured them in prison while interrogating them. But since they were blindfolded while being interrogated, their suspicions are based only on the sounds they remember of his walking with a peg leg. They debate what revenge to take on him, but first must confirm that they have the right man.
IranWire said the film “takes a critical lens, not just to ward the regime but towards some of its opponents who, in their zeal against their oppressor, come to mimic its violent methods. By painting a negative picture of Hamid, a former political prisoner who advocates a take-no-prisoners approach to the alleged torturer, Panahi’s film makes a political gesture by criticizing extremism in the opposition.”
This is Panahi’s first overtly political film—and it reflects his bleak view of where Iran is headed. “I think ultimately violence will be inevitable,” he told reporters in Cannes. “And it’s exactly what the regime wants, because it gives a justification for the repression. The longer they remain and the more pressure they put on the people, the more the people will feel that they have no other solution. And that’s when it will get dangerous.”
Panahi, who was imprisoned from July 2022 to February 2023, based his script on his own and his friends’ personal experiences in prison.
He previously won the top prizes at the Venice Film Festival for “The Circle” in 2000 and the Berlinale festival in the German capital for “Taxi” in 2015, giving him an awards’ hat trick. Only three other film directors have previously won all three awards—Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Altman and Henri-Georges Clouzot.
Panahi is only the second Iranian to win the Palme d’Or, generally rated the highest film award after an Oscar for Best Picture. The first Palme d’Or to an Iranian went to the late Abbas Kiarostami for his 1997 film “A Taste of Cherry.”
When Panahi arrived for the screening of “It was Just an Accident,” the audience gave him a 10-minute standing ovation, which festival officials said was a record ovation. It was likely recognition of the Islamic Republic’s restrictions on him— jailing him, barring him from leaving Iran for so long, and banning him from making any films—the last restriction treated with disdain and ignored by Panahi.
Panahi also made a point of saying he would not go into exile and would return to Iran as soon as the Cannes festival was over.
At the airport on his return, he was greeted by enthusiastic fans. But in the media, it was a different matter. The regime made clear its disapproval. The Student News Network, run by Pasdaran, accused Panahi of “selling out Iran” and portrayed his prize-winning film as “an anti-Iran project.” The Fars news agency was much milder, despite its links to the Pasdaran, assailing the film as an “ordinary” work that didn’t deserve any awards. The daily Hamshahri took a different tack, not criticizing the film but diminishing the festival as insignificant, citing a poll that showed only 8 percent of American adults were even aware of the Cannes festival while another poll found that 71 percent of the French called it superficial.
And the Tehran Times argued, “Ultimately, what occurred at Cannes this year provides another instance where we see Western cinema to be not an arena for artistic contention, but an arena of political score-settling—where juries measure a movie not with the yardstick of artistry, but with the scale of politics.”
In accepting the award, Panahi made sure to rankle the authorities back in Tehran. And dressing “all Iranians, regardless of their opinions, in Iran and around the world,” he said: “The most important thing is our country and the freedom of our country. Let us together reach the moment when no one dares to tell us what to wear, what to do, or what not to do.”
This would normally earn an Iranian citizen at least a few months in a cell. But the Islamic Republic seems to despair of punishing Panahi anymore. He has garnered an immense level of support from the international film community and every time the regime acts against Panahi, it wins the regime more condemnation than it appears willing to tolerate. So, the establishment grits its teeth and mutters but doesn’t resort to the guillotine.
It might well prefer that Panahi would follow other dissidents and just go into exile. Panahi won’t do that. “It’s simple,” he explained to reporters in Cannes. “I’m unable to live here. I have no ability to adapt to a new country, a new culture. Some people have this ability, this strength. I don’t.”
Panahi, 64, was making his first appearance at the festival in many years since the Islamic Republic had barred him from leaving the country for 15 years, Among the 22 films in contention for the Palme d’Or were “Woman and Child,” directed by Iranian Saeed Roustayi, who said he would return home but was concerned about his reception from the authorities, and “Al pha,” a French film starring exile Golshifteh Farahani, who won’t return home.
Roustayi made his film in Iran and abided by the rule that all women in a film must cover their hair, even in domestic scenes where women would not normally cover themselves. In Panahi’s winning film, however, the female actresses are uncovered in all scenes.
Roustayi said, “I don’t know to what extent I’m self-censoring but, ultimately, I live in Iran. I’m making films in Iran and I very much want people to see my films on the big screen. So, probably, I am observing certain boundaries so that my films can make it to the screen.”
Panahi, on the other hand, has made all his recent films clandestinely and sneaked them out of the country, to the considerable irritation of the authorities. None of his more recent films are allowed to be shown in Iran.
Born in Mianeh in East Azerbaijan in 1960, Panahi served in the army during the Iran-Iraq war and then attended film school in Tehran. He made several short films and documentaries for state television and worked as an assistant to Kiarostami. His debut feature film directorial role was “The White Balloon,” which was written by Kiarostami and won the 1995 Camera d’Or award at Cannes for first-time directors.
In 2009, he was barred from traveling outside Iran in punishment for attending the funeral of a student killed in the protests that year. The travel ban was lifted in 2023.
The festival’s closing awards ceremony took place as planned despite a five-hour power outage in the city earlier in the day, which authorities suspect was caused by arson at a power station. A police spokeswoman said it was not known whether there was a connection between the incident and the film festival.
