LOS ANGELES — In the final moments of “It Was Just an Accident,” a sound returns.
It is subtle, unmistakable and, for those who have lived under interrogation rooms and blindfolds, almost physical. The noise lands somewhere in the nervous system before it reaches the brain.
For Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, that ending was never accidental.
“The film began with sound,” Panahi said during a master class at the Armenian Film Society. “You hear this sound in the first 15 minutes of the film and then you don’t hear it for more than an hour until the very ending. And it had to be such a sound that when you hear it at the end, you recognize it and say, ‘Oh, he has come.’”
Panahi’s latest film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Palme d’Or, has since been nominated for two Academy Awards. But as he travels alone to promote it, navigating single-entry visas and the uncertainty in Iran, he speaks less about accolades and more about responsibility.
“I actually believe this film is a very good document of what has happened in Iran,” he said. “It testifies to the fact that the violence did not come from the people. The violence was injected into society by the state.”
During a masterclass held at the Armenian Film Society Headquarters in Glendale, he talked about how the film was made in secret. Though his formal bans on filmmaking and travel were lifted, Iran’s permit system requires scripts to be submitted for approval — and revised until they are no longer the filmmaker’s own.
“I knew that as soon as I gave that script, there is no way they’re going to give it a permit,” he said. “So I decided to continue working in the underground style.”
The production was stripped to its essentials: five or six crew members in total. They shot in deserts and enclosed spaces first, hiding cameras inside a van before attempting open city scenes. At one point, plainclothes agents raided the set. Equipment was hidden. Team members were questioned. The project paused for a month.
Altogether, the film was shot in 25 sessions.
But it is one scene — a 13-minute unbroken shot — that anchors the film’s moral center.
In it, the interrogator — blindfolded, tied to a tree — is finally visible. For much of the film, he has existed off-screen, confined inside a van, described by others. In this scene, the camera does not cut away. It does not rescue the audience with reaction shots. It stays.
“If I were to be visually just,” Panahi said, “he had to be present and the other characters had to be absent.”
The choice was deliberate. A medium shot. An open frame. No camera movement to follow the others as they enter and exit. The interrogator remains the focus.
“If I were a political filmmaker, I would have destroyed that interrogator from the beginning and, in the end, I wouldn’t have returned to him,” Panahi said. “But I consider him a human being too, and I allow him to speak.”
The scene took two nights to complete — 10 takes the first night, four or five the second. The actor, blindfolded and bound, had to sustain a performance for 13 minutes. Two or three seconds of weakness would have ruined the take. When they didn’t get the shot the first night, he wondered why.
Panahi eventually realized the problem was not technical.
“I realized I’m the problem,” he said. “Because I really didn’t know the character of the interrogator well.”
He called a friend, journalist and former political prisoner Mehdi Mahmoudian, who had spent nine and a half years in prison. Mahmoudian coached the actor, explaining how interrogators speak, how they pause, how they shift tone from minute to minute.
“The shot came together the second night,” Panahi said.
Two weeks ago, Mahmoudian was arrested again.
Panahi describes himself not as brave, but as a filmmaker who made a choice.
“I have always said that we only have two types of filmmakers in the world,” he said. “Ninety-five percent look out to see what the audience wants and then make that film. The other five percent say, ‘I will make my own film, and now it is on the audience to chase me.’”
He does not reject either category. But he is clear about where he stands.
“I consider myself a socially engaged filmmaker,” he said. “I make my films with a humanist outlook.”
That distinction matters. In a moment when anger and grief feel overwhelming — particularly after what he described as a recent “horrific massacre” in Iran — Panahi resists vengeance as narrative fuel.
“If I want to make a film about what happens today, I don’t know what topic I will pick,” he said. “Because anger, mourning and vengeance have overcome us to the point that we are not free from them yet to see clearly.”
Instead, he raises a question: What happens to the cycle of violence? Does it continue, or does someone interrupt it?
The ambiguity of the ending reflects that tension. When the sound returns, the audience must decide: Did the interrogator come back? Was he moved? Is redemption possible?
“You continue thinking about it after leaving the movie theater,” Panahi said. “Did what they do affect him? No matter how you look at it, you might get to the conclusion that even he could have been moved a bit. And you become hopeful of the future without violence.”
As an Iranian, watching the film is not an abstract exercise. It is the cold interrogation rooms. It is the blindfold pressed too tightly against the skin. It is the sound you cannot forget.
Panahi knows that sound intimately. During his own interrogations, he said, he was blindfolded and made to face a wall while answering questions from someone behind him.
“Your sense of hearing goes into overdrive,” he said. “Sound becomes the most important element.”
In “It Was Just an Accident,” sound becomes conscience.
Panahi has served prison time. He has faced 20-year bans on filmmaking, writing, travel and interviews. When those restrictions first came down, he turned inward, making films such as “This Is Not a Film” and “Taxi,” works that transformed confinement into form.
“When that happens, you become your own issue,” he said. “You return to yourself.”
But with this film, he steps back behind the camera and outward again — toward society, toward the prisoners he left behind.
“The day I was freed from prison and I looked behind me and saw those very tall walls, I thought, ‘I am out, and my friends are still inside,’” he said. “That’s when I felt a burden on my shoulders.”
The film is his attempt to lift it.
He plans to return to Iran after the Oscars. During the campaign, he said he learned of an additional one-year prison sentence and a two-year travel ban awaiting him.
