It Was Just an Accident: The Humanity of Doubt

Essays—

Jun 30, 2026

The distinction between social and political cinema is not always clear. The former category, which focuses on realistic portrayals of the everyday lives and struggles of the working class, generally includes the films of Italian neorealism and British social realism, as well as the first generation of the Iranian New Wave (the early films of Abbas Kiarostami and Amir Naderi, for example). The depictions of similar social struggles become more political in the Czechoslovak New Wave, Latin American Third Cinema, and the second generation of the Iranian New Wave (Asghar Farhadi, Jafar Panahi), by filmmakers who found themselves in the role of mediators between growing civil political awareness and the repressive impositions of a ruling class. Nonetheless, the social and the political are inseparable in both of these cinematic modes, reflecting the way the lines between what is social and what is political can blur in societies that are undergoing or emerging from revolutions, wars, and regime collapses.

A socially engaged film with a political topic, It Was Just an Accident (2025) is Panahi’s eleventh feature, and his sixth made clandestinely in Iran. It’s based on his two experiences as a prisoner of conscience in Iran, in 2010 and 2022–23, which included solitary confinement, hunger strikes, and interrogation sessions. The film was shot in just twenty-five days, following the end of a twenty-year sentence that banned the director from filmmaking, writing, giving interviews, and traveling abroad. Still, Panahi adamantly identifies as a socially engaged filmmaker, not a political one. In authoritarian states, which benefit from blurring the boundaries between the social and the political as a form of control over plurality and dissent, artists tend to emphasize the distinction between the two, seeking to lay claim to their civil rights without being accused of political radicalism. Both this civilian tendency to detach the social from the political and the state’s attempts to conflate them are symptomatic of the power imbalances found in corrupt justice systems and collapsing legal and social orders. In a sense, this film is taking part in a tradition of cinema—from Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, and Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman—that depicts individual efforts to correct such power imbalances as vigilantism. Unlike most revenge thrillers, however, including Panahi’s own Crimson Gold (2003), It Was Just an Accident is also about the vigilante’s search for a way to settle with their doubt.

What does a group of torture victims do when they think they may have encountered their torturer outside prison? This central question of It Was Just an Accident is reminiscent of ones asked by other artists with lived experiences of authoritarianism, dictatorship, and repression—the Turkish playwright Tuncer Cücenoğlu, for example, in his 1980 Dead End, or the Argentina-born Chilean American playwright Ariel Dorfman in his 1990 Death and the Maiden. What sets Panahi’s film apart is that its dilemma extends beyond individual choices to encompass the communal decisions that must be made by conflicting voices—voices that often share a goal but not modalities. Some discover that their goal changes as they evaluate the means of reaching it.

“I dig for the truth, but while I do, something happens to it,” says the Writer in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. “He took everything: my dignity, my wife, my job. I lost everything. I even dug a hole to bury him alive. But he made me doubt,” says It Was Just an Accident’s former prisoner of conscience Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) of his interrogator and torturer Eqbal (Ebrahim Azizi). Vahid’s mentor, Salar (Georges Hashemzadeh), responds: “There’s no need to dig their graves. They’ve done it themselves. It’s your ideals you’d be burying.” Vahid must process not only what to do with his torturer but also what his ideals are and how to act on them with the freedom of a new beginning.

In the incident that sets the film’s plot in motion, Vahid, an Azeri-speaking mechanic, believes he has encountered Eqbal in the garage where he works, based on the distinctive squeaking of the man’s prosthetic leg (Vahid was always blindfolded during interrogations). He kidnaps Eqbal, intending to exact his revenge, but after some interaction is uncertain whether he has the right person and seeks to confirm the identification by consulting with several fellow victims—introducing the unpredictable variety of their opinions and styles. With each of the six characters who ultimately join Vahid in his van over the course of the film, a different layer of absurdist comedy is added to its social satire. Without overt genre stylization, a philosophical examination of political ethics transforms into a comedy of manners before a final tonal shift into a psychological thriller, with an ending that keeps us oscillating between hope and despair, life and death. Some of the film’s sarcasm and humor is lost in cultural and linguistic translation, such as the riotous language of the hot-tempered Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), as well as aspects of Elyasmehr’s phenomenal performance. Yet the experience of seeing the film in a movie theater is a communal one of confronting fear and uncertainty and processing collective trauma through laughter. In an emotionally charged sequence, Vahid begins burying the blindfolded Eqbal alive while Eqbal implores him to stop and swears he is not the torturer. In a moment of doubt, after seeing the fresh wounds on the man’s amputated leg, Vahid stops and lights a cigarette. Traveling with Panahi, I learned by experience that, in North America, the cut from Vahid in the grave to Vahid smoking while sitting ambivalently in the doorway of his van guarantees a laugh. Every time, Panahi turned to me and asked in bewilderment, “What are they laughing about?!” “The shift from absolute certainty to doubt, perhaps,” I’d reply.

To engage with doubt is to experience one’s humanity. That idea is central to It Was Just an Accident, and keeps us wondering throughout about ambiguities in the characters. First, there is the question of Eqbal’s identity. We may also be concerned that the group will not have the necessary “political creativity,” as Hannah Arendt called it, to come up with a solution, and that Eqbal will take revenge if his kidnappers permit him to go free. Some of the group are more determined, others less so. Only some of them develop the doubt that drives the narrative, but they all orbit the van, the hub of the action and, in itself, an active personage. In Panahi’s guerrilla filmmaking, the van also served the practical function of hiding the cast, crew, and equipment of an underground film being shot in broad daylight by a former prisoner of conscience.

This is “a film made for after the fall of the current regime,” in the words of its creator. Whether or not Iranian society is entering its post–Islamic Republic era, the film’s prophetic timing aligned its Oscar campaign with a most historic moment in Iran’s fate. During the January 2026 protests, the state almost completely lost its legitimacy with yet another mass killing in a telecommunications blackout, with death-toll estimates ranging from thousands to tens of thousands. By early March, the assassinations of Iran’s top political and military leaders in an unprovoked war by Israel and the U.S., along with the destruction of the country’s infrastructure, energy reserves, and defense systems, seemed to have brought the Islamic Republic to some of its weakest days since its formation in 1979.

In addition to the immediate Iranian context, Panahi recognizes that audiences around the world can relate to the film because they either have experiences of authoritarianism in their collective memory, are currently undergoing it, or fear its imminent rise. The film’s dilemmas resonate with today’s most pressing questions for the international community: When and where is a cycle of violence going to end, if at all? What should be done with the agents of a brutal system during and after its collapse, whether they were just following orders or loyally promoting its ideology? And after the fall of an authoritarian regime, what is a society’s capacity for a new beginning, i.e., its “natality,” as termed by Arendt? The first two questions are philosophically embedded in the plot of It Was Just an Accident. The question of natality, however, emerges and reemerges, even after the film ends, in the various interpretations of the final sequence’s sound, the source of which remains unclear.

The characters themselves portray the complexities of plurality as Arendt described them. Although in a revolutionary setting the vision for a new beginning may seem to be unified, in practice revolutionaries often find themselves competing to shape the winning narrative. The question is how to reconcile the disparate voices, if they even agree on the need for reconciliation. While each character in the group is emblematic of a type within the dissident milieu, Vahid himself closely resembles the real-life activist Mehdi Mahmoudian. Panahi met Mahmoudian in prison and later invited him to collaborate on dialogue for It Was Just an Accident. Mahmoudian, whose kidneys, like Vahid’s, were damaged while he was being tortured in prison, identified one of his torturers by his amputated arm when the man and his family entered Mahmoudian’s workplace, just as Eqbal does Vahid’s. True to his nonviolent principles, Mahmoudian amicably served his torturer, but, in a moment apart from the man’s family, reminded him of their former relationship. The former interrogator fled in fear, only to return the next day to apologize, explaining that he had just been following orders. In the film, Vahid, too, helps his torturer’s family. Unlike Mahmoudian’s torturer, Eqbal announces his ideological loyalty to the regime in the same breath with which he confesses his guilty conscience and his complexes from being bullied as a child. It is eventually Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a photojournalist in the group, who manages to bring Eqbal to his knees.

Shiva’s friend Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), another torture victim, enters the van in her white wedding gown, along with her politically neutral fiancé, Ali (Majid Panahi). Shiva and Golrokh, as well as Eqbal’s candid little daughter (Delnaz Najafi), who signifies hope in future generations, embody the iconoclastic agency of the Iranian women who broke away from tradition and breached the Islamic Republic’s most unassailable redline, on mandatory hijab, in the Women, Life, Freedom movement, born in 2022. The women of It Was Just an Accident represent a characteristic Panahi tribute to the significance of grassroots, bottom-up social and political change. Shiva’s abilities to doubt and to make Eqbal face himself both emerge from her desire for truth. This testifies to Panahi’s self-identification as a social, not a political, filmmaker: it is not the most polemical member of the group but the one with the strongest social roots who breaks the uncanny, cuts the shadow open, and actualizes the impossible.

Eqbal’s confession to Shiva unfolds in a twelve-and-a-half-minute medium shot of the torturer in the dark desert, illuminated only by the van’s red brake lights. Shiva and Vahid step in and out of the open frame as they force him to face his reality. The offscreen space in which the torture victims operate as whole individuals with autonomy and Arendtian natality is a neorealist window onto the intervention of social forces in the dark undercurrents of political extremism. Panahi’s principle of “visual justice,” which strives to give all characters a fair share of the camera, provides Eqbal a chance to respond and the audience ample breathing room in which to assess his self-defense. After discarding several takes, Panahi invited Mahmoudian to the set to guide the scene based on his extensive experience with interrogator-torturers. Mahmoudian’s advising and Azizi’s extraordinary performance, according to Panahi, saved the film. Blindfolded, with his hands tied behind him and his torso tightly roped to a tree, Azizi combines microexpressions of every possible facial muscle with minute vocal nuances that, again, highlight the significance of sound in this film.

Panahi embeds the question of a society’s potential to start anew in the film’s ending, which unfolds ambiguously; our interpretation of it relies on the way we hear it. The aura of secrecy surrounding all aspects of authoritarian rule keeps citizens in the dark, blindfolded metaphorically if not literally. In the absence of visual confirmation of political realities, soundscapes can guide the public’s perception of them. In the Islamic Republic, those included revolutionary songs and slogans from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, when the state realized that reminding citizens of the revolution’s unrealized glorious promises was counterproductive. Since 1979, schools, radio, and television have been used for broadcasting sonic propaganda (on television, over still images or videos). Additionally, over the past two decades, residents near nuclear and military sites have reported hearing unexplained loud, unusual sounds. In auditory authoritarianism, domination of the sonic environment without freedom of information is a power mechanism that blurs facts, invites speculation, and obstructs access to knowledge. Together with data concealment, auditory authoritarianism facilitates information manipulation and thought control.

Like other prisoners of conscience, Panahi himself was blindfolded while having to respond to his interrogator, whose footsteps he heard incessantly behind him. During those sessions, his curiosity about his interrogator sharpened his hearing and shaped his sonic experience of incarceration. The narrative fulcrum of It Was Just an Accident is the haunting political soundscape of a militant religious dictatorship. This is encapsulated in the sound of the prosthetic leg belonging to Eqbal, for whom the loss of his leg while fighting for the Islamic Republic in Syria is a badge of honor. Part father figure, part ISIS fighter, part Captain Ahab, Eqbal is politically demonic and socially human. His squeaking footsteps, heard only in the opening and closing sequences of the film, together with Hamid’s loud outbursts for revenge, are sonic reminders of the social calamities of political certainty, juxtaposed against the humanity of doubt in Vahid, Shiva, and Golrokh.

Panahi has said he was uncertain about the last twenty seconds of the film until he was in the editing room. In some of the discarded shots, there was dialogue; in others, Vahid turned to face Eqbal. In the end, nothing could have better captured the psychological warfare waged by auditory authoritarianism than the scene as we have it: Vahid in close-up from behind, his upper back and neck fused with the uncertainty of whether he is hearing Eqbal’s squeaking footsteps. As we wonder if the sound is real or imagined, we are vicariously assessing the group’s natality and capacity for pluralism. Whether the peaceful family man in Eqbal overcomes the evil torturer depends, for one thing, on whether we register the sound of his footsteps as only approaching Vahid or as first getting close to him and then, after a harrowing pause, receding. Regardless of what Vahid intended to do to the torturer, his doubt, and his recognition of his own freedom to start anew, inadvertently saves three lives. In Panahi’s own words: “Are we, as people, going to continue a multigenerational cycle of violence, or are we going to say ‘cut,’ at some point, and end it?”

It Was Just an Accident: The Humanity of Doubt

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