With a recent wave of Iranian films capturing the world’s attention, including this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner, It Was Just an Accident, and last year’s Oscar nominee, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof are at the forefront of Iranian filmmakers using art as a tool to resist oppression. Despite imprisonment, travel bans, and continued censorship by the Iranian government, they’ve continued to make films—often underground and in secret.
The Iranian government prevents Iranian filmmakers from speaking out about the country’s authoritarian regime and showcasing romantic love through physical gestures that it considers against Islamic tradition. Female actors are also expected to wear hijabs. Due to these strict rules that reinforce gender roles, more and more Iranian filmmakers are going the independent route, which doesn’t come without risk: Iranian filmmakers who shoot films without proper permits from Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance face threats of imprisonment, as well as having their passports confiscated and their homes raided.
When these filmmakers choose not to cave to government demands in order to receive funding and permit allocations, they have to find creative solutions to make films. When filming The Seed of the Sacred Fig, for example, Rasoulof was never physically on set in Iran and communicated to the actors strictly through an audio monitor or walkie-talkie. To protect the small cast, everyone was given a fake script to present in case authorities discovered their filming. When editing It Was Just An Accident, Amir Etminan had to make sure he wasn’t connected to the Internet and wasn’t allowed to read the full script for security purposes.
Though Panahi (who has been arrested by Iranian authorities four times, and was recently sentenced to one year in prison for “propaganda activities”) and Rasoulof (who fled Iran last year after being sentenced to eight years in prison for “collusion against national security”) are the most notable working Iranian dissident filmmakers, films from emerging Iranian directors have debuted at thousands of worldwide film festivals in the years since the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, which comments on the Iranian community’s differing views on how to achieve justice and create meaningful change in society, is the latest in the filmmaker’s decades-long career of making strong political statements. His 2000 film, The Circle, which criticized the harsh treatment of women in Iran, was banned in his home country despite winning the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The Iranian government labeled the film as “offensive to Muslim women.”
“There was a time when it was very difficult to make films that break red lines,” Panahi tells The Progressive through his translator, Sheida Dayani, referring to the Iranian government’s regulations, including its censorship code for film. “When I made The Circle, a lot of people were mad at me. They said that whatever I brought up in my films will allow the censors to become more forceful against them. But that film broke the red lines, and other filmmakers also dared to put their foot on the other side. Some films are trailblazers, and they open the path for others.”
In 2010, the award-winning filmmaker was sentenced to six years in prison by the Islamic Revolutionary Court, which labeled his filmography as “propaganda.” Panahi was also handed a twenty-year filmmaking ban. However, he was released from prison after two months and continued to make films covertly, including a 2011 documentary titled This is Not a Film. He was again arrested in 2022 and released the following February after going on a forty-eight-hour hunger strike. It Was Just an Accident was directly inspired by his experience being imprisoned. The story follows a mechanic, played by Vahid Mobasseri, who believes he has found the man who tortured him in prison, but can’t be certain because he was blindfolded the entire time. In his attempt to enact revenge, the man connects with a group of former Iranian prisoners to try and verify the captor’s identity before deciding whether or not to kill him.
The relevance of his latest film is reinforced by the news earlier this month that Panahi has been sentenced in absentia to one year in prison in Iran. The same night the news was announced, Panahi won the best director award for It Was Just an Accident at the Gotham Awards. While speaking at the Marrakech Film Festival days after learning of his prison sentence, Panahi expressed his desire to return to Iran as soon as the movie’s Oscar campaign finishes in March. “I know my films don’t please the government. But that’s not a reason not for me to go back to my country. I will go back,” Panahi told festival attendees.
Since the Iranian New Wave movement in the 1960s and 1970s, female filmmakers have increasingly used their artistic voices to speak out. Most recently, Iranian American filmmaker Mehrnoush Alia’s directorial debut 1001 Frames premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and won the best feature award at the Thessaloniki Film Festival in Greece. Shot in one location without a government permit, a practical choice given the challenges of filming on location in Iran, the unsettling story follows a series of auditions for a film inspired by the Arabic folktale A Thousand and One Nights. During these auditions, young women are asked to improvise uncomfortable scenes by an older male director.
The project began when Alia was an undergraduate film student. When she moved to New York, she talked to actors who had experienced abuse in the film industry. While the film’s themes of misogyny and exploitation apply to filmmaking around the world, Alia says she chose to shoot in Iran and cast Iranian actors after the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022, which ignited a nationwide movement for women’s freedom.
“My intention when expanding the short into a feature was to shoot in the United States, but when I was in Iran, I had access to these great actresses. And after the Women, Life, Freedom movement, I decided it would be more interesting,” Alia tells The Progressive. “The film is not only about the film industry, but anywhere where we have abuse of power.”
Iranian cinema also tends to lean into the meta; many films include details about, or have plots completely centered around, the difficulties of making films in Iran. No Iranian director has incorporated their personal struggles with filmmaking more clearly than Ali Asgari (who was banned from leaving Iran in 2023 after making Terrestrial Verses) in his humorous Divine Comedy, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival. The entire premise of the film revolves around a filmmaker, played by Bahram Ark, trying to get his film screened in Iran. The lengths Bahram has to go to in order to simply show his film in a theater are often absurd, including having to converse with an egotistical theater owner and being questioned for simply featuring a dog in the film.
“While you’re talking about Iranian cinema, we normally think about sad and tough films,” Asgari tells The Progressive. “But this time, I didn’t want to repeat the same approach. I tried to make fun of the situation that exists. It was very important not to victimize myself as a filmmaker and an artist.”
For Asgari, who was born in Tehran and has been directing features since 2017, it has been encouraging to see younger filmmakers break into the Iranian filmmaking scene.
“The community is not that big because we don’t communicate that much as the films are made underground and without permission. Most of them are made in a very quiet and hidden way,” Asgari says. “That’s why, most of the time, I don’t know [by] whom and when the films are made, and I only hear [about] it later. The good thing is that the interest for making these kinds of Iranian films has been rising all the time, and it’s been out of control of the system.”
As Panahi continues his worldwide publicity tour, all eyes are on how It Was Just An Accident will perform at the Oscars following its four Golden Globe nominations. The Academy of Motion Pictures and Science’s submission rules for international films require countries to approve the submitted film; the Iranian government has never nominated Panahi’s work due to its political nature. (This year, Iran’s official entry is Cause of Death: Unknown, which tackles human ethics, trust, and survival rather than politics and resistance.)
Because It Was Just an Accident was co-produced between Iran, France, and Luxembourg, France submitted the film for Best International Feature. NEON, an independent American film production and distribution company, is also campaigning the film across several top categories, including Best Picture and Best Director. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which was nominated last year, faced a similar situation after being submitted by Germany. But it’s not an ideal situation for the Iranian film community, who want their official country submission to represent the best of what the country’s filmmakers have to offer.
“Let’s face it, when our film is at the Oscars, people do watch it, so it’s very important. It has been a struggle all along for Iranian filmmakers,” Alia says. She references A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s 2011 film that almost didn’t get selected despite being critically acclaimed. It ended up winning the Oscar that year for Best International Feature.
Iranian filmmakers across the board, including Panahi, have used the growing spotlight to advocate for changes in the Academy’s nomination approval process. And perhaps if It Was Just An Accident wins a major award, that change might come.
“These films represent the better Iranian cinema, and at the same time, the real Iran,” Asgari says. “The submitted films have to obey the rules of the government in their films, which is not the real Iran anymore.”