Life after imprisonment haunts trailer for Palme d'Or winner It Was Just An Accident

It Was Just An Accident is described as a “searing moral thriller that engages with complex ideas about the uncertainty of the truth and the choice between revenge and mercy.” Per the synopsis, “Vahid, an unassuming mechanic, has a chance encounter with Eghbal, a man he strongly suspects to be his former sadistic jailhouse captor. Panicked, Vahid gathers several former prisoners, all abused by that same captor, to try and confirm Eghbal’s identity. As the bickering group drives around Tehran with the captive, they must confront how far to take matters into their own hands with their presumed tormentor.” 

Finally freed of the filmmaking ban, Panahi told Film Comment, “I was able to open up, and to dedicate my work, my film, to the people I had spent time with in prison.” It Was Just An Accident is a reflection of reacclimating to the world outside. “Life definitely goes on, but [that experience] has left its impact,” he explained. “You are released from the smaller prison, but you’re still in a larger prison and still completely haunted by the experience, and anything can bring you back to that memory. I even had a scene in Taxi where at some point I’m driving and I hear a noise, and I asked my niece, ‘Did you also hear that?’ I’m looking for the noise. And then [human-rights lawyer] Nasrin Sotoudeh gets in my car, I tell her about the sound, and she says that all inmates have this obsession about sound or about the voice of their interrogator. So there was a reference already in that movie, and here it’s more developed.”