Iran Wants Him Arrested. He’s Going Back Anyway.

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Late in Jafar Panahi’s Oscar-nominated film, It Was Just an Accident, comes a confrontation. An Iranian woman looks into the face of a sadistic prison official and taunts, “You think this country belongs to you?” Panahi, who wrote and directed the film, describes it as an artificial fast-forward, set in a time when the violence has died down, the prisoners have been released, life has returned to normal, and the urgent open question is to forgive or to take revenge.

Of course, that time still feels far away. The Iranian regime has recently killed thousands of protesters and sentenced even moderate dissenters to long prison sentences. Panahi’s co-writer Mehdi Mahmoudian was recently jailed after signing a letter objecting to the crackdowns. Panahi, who also signed the letter and has been touring the United States to promote his film, has been sentenced to one year in prison in absentia. His lawyer has said they plan to appeal the sentence. Still, he insists that as soon as Oscar season is over, he will head back home.

Like many of Panahi’s other films, this one is improbably funny. The action mostly consists of four misfits driving around Tehran fighting about what to do with the man they’ve kidnapped, someone they believe to be their torturer. Also like his other films, he shot it in secret, with limited takes, natural lighting, and locations chosen to evade the authorities (nearly a third of the film is shot from inside a van). Panahi has been ducking censors long enough that he seems to have cracked the code of how to make rich, sarcastic, brutally critical movies despite the regime’s relentless repression. And in the case of It Was Just an Accident, he made a movie that offers empathy even to the torturer.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Panahi about his characters, his film’s enigmatic ending, and what he’s hearing from friends in Iran. Panahi was in the U.S. when American protesters were shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, and we talk about parallels he sees between the U.S. and Iran.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s latest movie, It Was Just an Accident, shot in secret in Tehran, is nominated for two Oscars. In it, a group of misfits roam around in a white van trying to figure out what to do with the person they just kidnapped.

[Clip from It Was Just an Accident]

Rosin: One of the women is wearing a wedding dress the whole time. One of the men is a hothead, perpetually at 11. They bicker about what to do with their victim, who is sedated and locked in a box.

[Clip from It Was Just an Accident]

Rosin: It’s the setup for a caper, and lots of ridiculous things do happen. But at its core, the movie is driving towards the country’s real open wound.

The man locked in the box is someone they all suspect to have been their torturer in prison, a sadistic agent o