When you are interrogated at Evin prison in Tehran, recalls Jafar Panahi, you are blindfolded and placed on a chair facing a wall. The interrogators are behind you, and you answer their disembodied questions on paper, lifting the blindfold to write. Their voices are “the only way you can know them”. The political prisoner starts wondering, “Are they young, are they old?”
Mr Panahi, one of Iran’s best known film-makers, has been locked up twice by its rocking theocratic regime. He drew on his and other inmates’ experiences in “It Was Just An Accident” (pictured), which is up for two Oscars on March 15th. War has made the movie’s theme of moral reckoning seem fiercely urgent. It and the director epitomise the eternal stand-off between artists and authoritarians: an unequal contest—camera and pen against bullet and noose—but not in the way it might seem.
In the film, a family’s car breaks down after hitting a dog. Vahid, a local labourer played touchingly by Vahid Mobasseri, suspects the driver (Ebrahim Azizi) is the goon who tortured him behind bars. To make certain, Vahid binds and gags the man in his van and seeks confirmation from other survivors, among them a woman posing for photos in her wedding dress. To identify him they rely on the squeak of his artificial leg, the tang of his sweat and contours of his skin; traces of the gruesome, sightless intimacy between torturer and victim.
The result is a visceral thriller, propelled by the twin mysteries of whether the ragtag crew have the right man and what they will choose to do with him. But it is also an absurdist caper. “Waiting for Godot” is namechecked when they park in a desert, beside a blasted tree, and quarrel over the captive’s fate. What, viewers may wonder, is the accident in “It Was Just An Accident”: the car hitting the dog, the driver’s run-in with Vahid, or the whole predicament of living under a brutal, capricious government?
At heart, this is an inquiry into moral responsibility under—or after—tyranny. The interrogator is merely a cog in the system, a character argues. “These scumbags created the system!” another counters. “We aren’t killers,” says one. “We’re not like them.” Others crave revenge.
Yet ultimately the story is hopeful: because it insists on the humanity even of its villain, and because it imagines, allegorically, a time of judgment. With missiles shaking Tehran, that may come sooner than anticipated. As Mr Panahi put it on a visit to London, shortly before the new conflict began, the film’s central question is, “Shall we stop the cycle of violence, or shall we allow it to continue?”
Outside the city, Vahid and his comrades are safe. Carting a kidnapped torturer around the capital is much riskier. In this the characters’ quirky odyssey reflects the peril of Mr Panahi’s unlicensed crew. They shot the passages in the desert first, he explains from behind his signature dark glasses, plus the interiors and sequences in the van. Only then did they tackle the more exposed street scenes—which the police duly interrupted.
He is used to improvising. As well as his months-long stints in prison, which included a spell in solitary confinement and a hunger strike, he has previously been banned from travelling abroad and making movies. In response he shot a film in his flat and called it “This Is Not A Film”. He drove a taxi around the city—driving was his only other skill, he jokes—recording the passengers inside it. The upshot was the inimitable “Taxi Tehran”. If you are determined to keep working, “The solution comes to you,” Mr Panahi says. Sticking with his medium has been a defiant message in itself: “It’s a way of standing up to power.”
This resilience and ingenuity may yet be called on again. In his absence abroad, Mr Panahi has been sentenced to a year in prison. (Mehdi Mahmoudian, a collaborator on the Oscar-nominated screenplay, was briefly banged up, too.) Still, before the war erupted, he planned to return after the Academy Awards. “It’s my country,” he says simply.
Even without the bombardment, Mr Panahi thought, the slaughter of protesters showed that Iran’s rulers had reached “a dead end”. In any case, if people want to stop him making movies, “That’s their problem, not mine. I’ve made my choice.” Past bids to thwart him have not just failed but backfired, his punishments transmuted on screen into drama and dignity. After all, if he hadn’t been sent to Evin, “I may never have made this film.” With all their tools of repression, in this unequal struggle with the artist, the strongmen are doomed.
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