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Jafar Panahi’s dissident films.

Jafar Panahi’s Scenes From a Crime

His films show how a regime’s wrongdoing can upend one’s sense of self and transform the very rhythm of daily life.

The photographs of Eugène Atget document the ghostly residues of a Paris on the verge of disappearance. Typically devoid of people or other signs of life, Atget’s images capture desolate and seemingly unremarkable urban locations—an empty street, an enigmatic building—that seem pregnant with some kind of meaning, but obstinately refuse to disclose it. These were locations that would soon be wiped out by the urban modernization of the city initiated by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, which replaced sections of old Paris with wide boulevards. Walter Benjamin remarked that Atget photographed these streets “like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence.” Evidence of what? Atget’s photography insistently courts this question, even as it declines to answer. 

In Jafar Panahi’s most recent film, It Was Just an Accident, a city’s seemingly banal locales are similarly reframed as sites of some terribly important yet elusive meaning. But here, what invests the quotidian with portending significance is sound. On the outskirts of Tehran, a car mechanic opens up his garage late at night for a stranded traveler whose car has broken down. As the traveler walks around, the squeak of his prosthetic leg becomes audible. The mechanic looks shaken, and the next day, he follows the man into the city, where he kidnaps him and drives him out to a remote stretch of desert. As the mechanic, Vahid, starts digging a grave, he accuses the man of torturing him when he was imprisoned for his labor activism years ago, leaving him with a permanent limp. And the proof of his identity, Vahid claims, is the unmistakable sound of the squeaking prosthetic limb that belonged to the torturer, whom the prisoners called Peg Leg. 

Begging for his life as Vahid piles dirt on top of him, the man denies being Peg Leg, and Vahid decides that he can’t go through with it without being sure. So he locks the man in a box in the trunk of his van and drives into Tehran in search of other prisoners who might be able to verify the man’s identity. As the film embarks on this tour of the city, Tehran’s banal settings take on an ominous air. In the same manner as Atget’s photographs, the street corners and parking lots hold their tongue as Vahid sets off on a kind of detective story, trying to piece together evidence of the regime’s crimes.     

As perhaps the Iranian film industry’s most high-profile dissident, Panahi himself is no stranger to being victimized by his government. Since the release of his third feature film, The Circle (2000), which portrayed the misogyny of Iranian society, Panahi’s films have been banned by the government, and he has officially been prohibited from directing. A government official castigated The Circle for its “completely dark and humiliating perspective” on Iran, but Panahi continued to make politically critical films despite increasing pressure from the government. He was later imprisoned for several months in 2010 and then, after a hunger strike, placed under house arrest; in 2023, he was imprisoned again after protesting the sentence of his fellow director Mohammad Rasoulof. (He was released after another hunger strike.) 

Panahi defied the attempts to silence him by making films in secret throughout this time. It Was Just an Accident is no exception: Although it uses many bustling streets in Tehran as backdrops, it was made illegally, without approval from the government. It has gone on to garner widespread international acclaim, winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival—which only seems to have aggravated the Iranian government’s persecution of Panahi. In December, while traveling in the United States to promote the film, Panahi was sentenced in absentia to one year in prison and a two-year ban from leaving Iran. Although he remains free while abroad, he has vowed to return to Iran and face the charges, despite the protests that recently convulsed the country and threatened to topple the Islamic Republic. At the end of January, one of Panahi’s co-screenwriters on It Was Just an Accident, Mehdi Mahmoudian, was arrested after he signed a statement condemning the regime’s killing of protestors. Panahi signed the statement too. “I am the kind of person who needs to be in his country,” Panahi said when asked if the unrest had changed his resolve to return. “I need to breathe there and work there. And even if they want to go ahead with that prison sentence, they can go ahead. Nothing will change my mind about going back.” 

Panahi began his career as an assistant director for the renowned Abbas Kiarostami, whose contemplative films gently blurred the boundary between documentary and fiction. In........

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