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It was Just an Accident
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Still from It Was Just an Accident © Les Films Pelleas
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The German premiere of Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident was held at the Hamburg Film Festival in October 2025, following its triumph at Cannes, where it won the top prize. Panahi himself was unable to attend, but he appeared in a pre-recorded video message shown before the screening. Filmed in an airport, Panahi was slightly distracted, addressing the Hamburg audience with evident warmth before suddenly interrupting himself: he thought he might be heading in the wrong direction.
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For anyone who has followed Panahi's career, it was genuinely a moving sight to see the Iranian filmmaker walking freely and in good spirits. His life and work have long been shaped by repression at the hands of the Iranian regime: prison sentences (including several stints in the notorious Evin prison), a house arrest, travel bans, and a ban on filmmaking have been some of the consequences, yet nothing has succeeded in breaking Panahi’s resolve. He has found creative ways of circumventing the constraints placed on him, setting films within the confines of his own four walls or inside a taxi navigating the streets of Tehran.
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Panahi has often been accused by the authorities of producing anti-regime propaganda, but it is his latest film that directly confronts the mechanisms of state violence. Only last year, he was sentenced to prison in absentia — and Panahi has already announced that he plans to return home to confront this head-on, rather than live in exile, once he's done promoting his latest work around the world.
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It Was Just an Accident follows a mechanic who comes to believe that a customer in need of help one night might be the same person who once tortured him in prison. Unsure, he gathers fellow former prisoners to help confirm the man’s identity, and, if his suspicions are proven true, to exact revenge. It is a bold and unsettling premise, and Panahi ventures into darker territory than much of his earlier work. Yet even here, his unmistakable lightness of touch remains. He prevents the film from ever tipping into the absurd or unreal. The very last, show-stopping shot deserves a special mention, and is likely to provoke the most discussion. It Was Just an Accident is now showing in German cinemas.
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If you missed it, you can also read our latest entry to our ongoing series on the Rise & Fall of the BRD by Simon Strick. And this week we're also featuring a new Seifenblase by Alexander Schnickmann on a perennial classic: Moby-Dick.
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Simon Strick
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Hundreds of tweets like these spell out what was already implied in police cordons, passport controls, and public suspicion since October 7, 2023: that Neukölln is a sealed-off or soon-to-be-sealed-off space in which different conditions apply and different measures must be taken — a Gaza 2, an open-air prison, a haven of Islamist terrorists wielding New Year’s Eve fireworks. This phantasmatic space offered numerous possibilities for further identifications: If Neukölln is Gaza, then Germany is Israel; if migrants are Hamas, then German police officers are the IDF; if migrants are antisemitic terrorists, then Germans are Israeli Jews, and so on. There were and there are endless ways of interpreting the situation on New Year’s Eve — the clash between police and youth, between Germans and migrants — along the lines of the “New Gaza” phantasm and use it for one’s own political or Twitter project.
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Alexander Schnickmann
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This book too is a whale. I know everything about whales. Especially how to kill them and cut them up. I know about the significance of sperm, buckets, gallons of sperm (was it steaming?); now I also know that in German it’s called Walrat, which I like much less. I know, obviously, simultaneously, that I know nothing about whales, nothing about the exaggerated slipperiness of whale signs and images, let alone the names. Hundreds of pages and none of them can be trusted: is it a fish or just a god? Hundreds of pages of hopeless taxonomy. I have never trusted science.
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