The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been imprisoned twice for making movies about his home country. It has yet to stop him.
In 2010, he was sentenced to six years in prison for “propaganda against the state.” He was released after three months. In 2022, he was arrested again and served seven months, an incarceration that involved hours of blindfolded interrogation. Panahi translated the experience into the Palme d’Or winner “It Was Just an Accident.” Due in theaters on Wednesday, the film examines the effects of torture on both victim and perpetrator.
Lesser men might have been cowed into submission by those experiences. For Panahi, now 65, they were invigorating. “The reality is I don’t know anything else other than cinema, so I prepare myself for everything, and I accept all costs,” he said.
Panahi wasn’t thinking about filmmaking when he was last in jail. He was held in a very public ward, among 300 prisoners, some 30 to 40 of them there for political reasons. He said he spent most of his time listening to the fellow inmates’ life stories.
“When I got out of jail, I turned around and looked at the gate, and I remembered all those faces,” Panahi said through a translator during an interview at the Telluride Film Festival in August. He added that months later, “these faces started becoming more real and marched in my head. I felt that I owed them something.”
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