Neon is hopeful that Jafar Panahi will be Stateside as early as Tuesday after an ongoing U.S. government shutdown slowed his visa causing him to miss a busy week of events led by the New York Film Festival premiere of his Cannes Palme d’Or winning film It Was Just An Accident.
The visa wasn’t ready in time to get him to that screening or to an NYFF sit-down with Martin Scorsese, a highlight of the festival’s talks’ lineup, which was canceled.
The fest’s Artistic Director Dennis Lim, flanked by Panahi’s French producers, introducing the premiere, called the director’s absence “an upsetting situation for many reasons.” Over the years, Panahi has been twice jailed in Iran and forbidden to film. “As threats to freedom of expression intensify here and around the world, he has shown us what it means to be an musician who meets the moment,” said Lim.
Panahi also missed a DGA screening Friday and a a BAFTA screening Saturday in NYC and won’t make it to a tribute at the Mill Valley Film Festival tonight.
That said, Neon, which is releasing the film theatrically this month, hopes Panahi will be able to fly to Los Angeles tomorrow for the West Coast Premiere at Beyond Fest. There’s an official Academy screening on Sunday. He’ll have some back and forth between LA and NY. NYFF, which runs through Oct. 13, will certainly do something nice for him. It had already scheduled an encore screening of It Was Just An Accident at BAM on Oct. 8.
Neon opens the film in New York at Film At Lincoln Center and Film Forum on Oct. 15 and in LA at AMC Century City on the 17th.
In his remarks, Lim called Panahi “one the greatest filmmakers of the last several decades. He has not been here in at least 25 years And I think this is what makes it the saddest — he is also an exemplary figure for this moment. Jafar Panahi has endured censorship, bans, arrests, all kinds of persecution. And through it all, he has made one remarkable movie after another, always speaking truth to power, always reflecting on his circumstances but also going beyond them.”
It Was Just An Accident, politically barbed but comedic, follows a group of wrongfully incarcerated working-class people seeking revenge against the prison guard who tortured and terrified them. The man they have captured has a peg leg like their abuser, yet they aren’t totally sure it’s the right guy. The film stars Vahid Mubasseri as a mechanic with painful kidney injuries from prison beatings who first follows the distinctive thumping sound of a prosthetic leg that’s etched on his brain and sets the plot in motion. The cast includes Maryam Afshari, Mohamad Polielyasmehr, Majid Panahi, Georges Hashemzadea, Delmaz Najafi and Afssaneh Najamabadi.
Panahi’s French producers Philippe Martin and David Thion described a harrowing 20-day shoot using two cars only for cast and crew to avoid attracting attention. Nonetheless, the team was stopped and arrested briefly, the lens confiscated. Luckily, most of the material resided on a computer, which was not. Footage was moved to France, with all post-production in Paris. It wasn’t clear until the last minute that the entourage would be able to leave for Cannes. Women in the cast were warned that they’d have big trouble back home if they walked the Red Carpet without headscarves.
When Panahi returned to Teheran from Cannes, the producers said, a massive, welcoming crowd at the airport along with the halo of a Palme d’Or seemed to have created something of a safety net. “But you never know. He is living with the Sword of Damocles,” said Martin at the BAFTA screening.
It Was Just An Accident is France’s official Oscar submission for Best International Feature.
Panahi was in competition in Cannes in 2018 with 3 Faces, won the lens d’Or for his first film The White Balloon in 1995 and won a Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard for Crimson Gold in 2003.
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