The Palme d’Or, the top award at the Cannes Film Festival, has been won by It Was Just an Accident, an Iranian film that takes aim at the country’s totalitarian government.
Directed by Jafar Panahi, the film is about a group of former political prisoners, who abduct a man they believe was the guard who tortured them.
Receiving his award from actress Cate Blanchett, Panahi, who has twice been incarcerated for defying the government, said in his acceptance speech that it was time for Iranians to “set aside our differences. The important thing now is the freedom of our country, so that no one would dare to tell us what to wear or what film to make”.
While the film uses humour – there is a scene when a pair of security guards ask the protagonists to pay a bribe using an electronic card reader – it is, according to a report in the Times, “ultimately a protest against Iran’s government and an acknowledgement of the traumatising effects of its cruelty”.
While Panahi was in jail, he spent time in solitary confinement and went on a hunger strike.
Over a career which spans over 30 years, Panahi has made several films covertly. In his 2015 film, Taxi Tehran, he disguised himself as a taxi driver and invited people to sit in the back of his cab and chat to him about whatever they wanted, and he smuggled his 2011 documentary This is Not a Film out of the country on a flash drive hidden in a cake.
The making of It Was Just an Accident was almost jeopardised when plain-clothes police arrived on the set demanded Panahi to stop shooting and hand over his footage. According to the Times report, he refused. He said he believed he escaped punishment as filming took place during a presidential election, and the authorities wanted to avoid negative publicity.
Panahi’s win comes less than a week after more than 200 MPs united across parties to demand that the UK government proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – the armed wing of the Khameini regime.
The corps has been accused of coordinating assassinations of dissidents and terror attacks in foreign countries, but is yet to be classified as a terrorist organisation in the UK.
The new push for proscription was sparked by the announcement that three Iranian nationals – Farhad Javadi Manesh, Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori and Mostafa Sepahvand – would be charged under national security laws after allegedly spying on behalf of Iran.
