There’s a stillness in Jafar Panahi’s cinema that makes even the smallest gestures feel like confessions. In It Was Just an Accident, that stillness is suffocating. The trailer—debuted by Neon—doesn’t scream; it murmurs, stares, and lets the tension crawl under your skin. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival (where it premiered under its French title Un Simple Accident), the film distills political repression, moral ambiguity, and the peril of memory into a single van ride that refuses to end.
It begins with a man behind the wheel, the desert stretching endlessly ahead. Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a quiet mechanic, spots Eghbal—someone he’s almost certain is his former prison tormentor. Certainty is slippery; vengeance is not. Soon, he’s gathered other former prisoners, each carrying their own scars, into the same cramped vehicle as the man they believe brutalized them. The conversations oscillate between rage and doubt, the air thick with decades of unhealed wounds. It’s not a road trip. It’s a trial without a judge.
Panahi, whose past works (The Circle, Taxi Tehran, No Bears) already navigate the dangerous terrain between truth and survival, makes no concessions to easy answers here. The trailer hints at his signature restraint—wide shots that give us too much space to think, silences that scream louder than any score. Every face is a battleground. Every glance, a verdict.
There’s a faint absurdity in the imagery, too. A bride in full gown slumped against a van door. Men bickering in the middle of a dust-scoured nowhere. It’s almost surreal—until you remember that Panahi’s Iran is a place where the surreal is just another Tuesday. The Cannes jury’s decision to award it the Palme d’Or wasn’t a safe political nod; it was a recognition of a filmmaker still willing to confront his country’s shadows without blinking.
Neon will release It Was Just an Accident in select US theaters starting October 15, 2025. Until then, the trailer is a reminder that revenge narratives don’t have to move fast to be devastating. Sometimes they just have to keep driving, without a map, until someone decides whether to open the door—or not.
🎥 Watch the official US trailer here: YouTube – Neon
📅 Premiere: 2025 Cannes Film Festival — Palme d’Or Winner
📅 US Release: October 15, 2025 (select theaters)
5 Key Takeaways from the ‘It Was Just an Accident’ Trailer
Panahi’s most tense setup yet
The claustrophobia of a van filled with trauma survivors turns into a moral crucible.
Truth is unstable
The story hinges not on what happened, but on whether anyone can truly know.
The imagery is unsettlingly poetic
From desert sunsets to a slumped bride, every frame feels like a loaded question.
Political undercurrents are unavoidable
Even without direct slogans, the film’s critique of repression is unmistakable.
Patience as a weapon
Panahi uses stillness the way others use jump cuts—forcing you to linger where you’d rather not.
