One of Our Greatest Filmmakers Was Banned From Filmmaking. Now He's Back With Cannes' Best Movie.

As the movie that marked Jafar Panahi's return to the Cannes Film Festival after a 14-year travel ban by the Iranian government, It Was Just an Accident was a major contender for the festival's highest honor, the Palme d'Or, before the jury never laid eyes on it. Simply setting foot in the Lumière Theater on Tuesday earned Panahi a lengthy standing ovation—a big change considering that the last time one of his films premiered at a major festival he was sitting in jail. But as astonishing as Panahi's mother presence on the Croisette was, the movie itself is even more so.

Borrowing a premise from the Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden , It Was Just an Accident , which was acquired by Neon on Thursday for a US release, begins when Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), a middle-aged husband and father of a young daughter, hits a dog on a dark road while driving home late at night. He makes it to the nearest garage, where a mechanic makes a minor adjustment and sends the family on their way. But as Eghbal walks back to his car, the mechanic's co-worker Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) hears a familiar sound, one that has haunted him for years: the unmistakable squeak of Eghbal's prosthetic leg. Years ago, Vahid was thrown in prison and tortured for taking part in a political protest, and although he never saw his tormentor's face, he'd know that squeak anywhere—or so he thinks.

Vahid follows Eghbal, who he knows only as “Peg Leg,” home, and the next morning, he knocks him out and drags him out to the desert, where he plans to bury him alive. But Eghbal's anguished cries of protest sow doubt in his captor's mind, just enough to make him mull the consequences of being mistaken. So Vahid knocks him out once more and proceeds to drag his unconscious body all over town, presenting it to an ever-growing group of people who are bound together by one grim fact: They were all victims of the same torturer. Where Dorfman's play is a dramatic pressure-cooker, Panahi's story plays out as a bleak, absurdist farce, even before one of the victims asks another if they remember seeing Waiting for Godot . At one point, Vahid's van breaks down, and Panahi films the group, one of whom is a bride still in her wedding dress, pushing it through thick downtown traffic.

Although the Iranian government banned Panahi from making films for nearly 15 years, he never stopped, even though that meant working in secret and, in one famous case, smuggling the sardonically titled This Is Not a Film to Cannes on a flash drive. (Sadly, the too-good-to-be-true story that the drive was hidden inside a cake has turned out to be just that .) The international pressure generated by Panahi's 2023 hunger strike—seven months after being imprisoned for pressing for the release of jailed filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof ( The Seed of the Sacred Fig )—led to the early lifting of the filmmaking ban, and although his films are still subject to government censorship, there's a sense in It Was Just an Accident of him returning to the outside world, an experience that isn't as uniformly jubilant as it might seem.

In his last movie, No Bears , Panahi played himself, a criminalized artist furtively making films on the border between Turkey and Iran, a boundary he longingly stars over but does not dare to cross, only directing via remote livestream. And although he does not appear in It Was Just an Accident —the first time since the ban, and in nearly 20 years, that he has stayed entirely behind the camera—you can feel the pull of returning to a normal life, along with the knowledge of how impossible that will always be. Peg Leg's victims are in the midst of mundane tasks when Vahid catches up with them, Eghbal's unconscious body wedged into a wooden box in the back of his van. But as they run their fingers over his limbs, trying to discern if they're the same ones they clung to as they begged for mercy, the trauma of their imprisonment comes rushing back to them, as does the question of what, now, to do about it. Some want to put the past behind them, some to extract vengeance, and their arguments veer from moral debate to petty bickering and back again. If Panahi hasn't put himself in this movie, it's because he's all of the characters and not just one, giving voice to his rage, and to the warning that letting it consume him would be a prison of his own. And he knows that lashing out at the agents of state repression doesn't strike those who are most responsible for it. The movie's victims frequently repeat the conviction that they'd “never forget” the sound of their torturer's voice, his smell, the feel of his artificial leg. But the memories aren't as definitive as they thought they'd be, or perhaps they just look different in the daylight.