It Was Just an Accident (2025) is my favourite film from the past year, as it explores the moral dilemmas in the aftermath of living through an authoritarian regime. Perhaps as the filmmakers intended, the treatment of this film and other similarly political films ironically reflects the Western world’s cowardice and complicity in ongoing genocides across the world.
Director Jafar Panahi has had a turbulent filmmaking career, having been arrested and imprisoned multiple times by the Iranian regime for spreading propaganda and rebelling against the government. Although It Was Just an Accident can be seen as a semi-autobiographical recount of Panahi’s time in prison, its larger themes of moral relativity and political resistance are universal and make for a great thriller. One of the film’s greatest appeals to me is its ability to intertwine the political with the personal, with its socio-historical context serving as a backdrop to the protagonists’ struggles. While protagonists make decisions based on their personal moral beliefs, they also take radical political actions due to their context. In It Was Just an Accident, the protagonists stumble across a man who tortured them in an Iranian prison during the underground movement. Among conversations about having the ethical right to harm their torturer for having upheaved their lives and equating individual action to a collective regime, the protagonists engage in extremely heart-wrenching debates that shape their moral standings without being outrightly political.
It is not hard to learn from this film that one cannot possibly detach the political from the personal. Yet, recent controversies at the Berlin Film Festival have suggested the film industry’s ignorance of the oppression they’re funding, exposing their attempts to remove political subtext from films. The competition jury Wim Wenders—widely known as the director of Paris, Texas (1984)—has stated that “movies can change the world but not in a political way.” Jury member Ewa Puszczyńska, a producer on The Zone of Interest (2023), said that it was “unfair to ask us what do you think, who do you support.”
The jury members’ forced separation between politics and cinema is not only a fundamental misunderstanding of this art form, but is symptomatic of a larger political landscape; discussions about real issues are censored rather than celebrated due to the cowardice of extremely powerful people who fear losing their status and prestige. I am nostalgic for the brief period when being politically engaged was popular, as the recent turn of tides proves that the film industry has never been about voicing causes, but self-preservation and capitalising on trendy topics.
One might argue for Hollywood awards and their willingness to spotlight political films, citing No Other Land’s (2024) win for Best Documentary Feature Film at last year’s Academy Awards. Despite its overwhelming success, the film has never received a theatrical release in the US, and co-director Hamdan Ballal was attacked days after receiving his Oscar. This is evidence of Western peformativity, celebrating Palestinian talent while continuously funding Israel’s genocide. The awards are merely a tiny bandage slapped onto a gaping wound, and it isn’t a far-off estimate to say that the Academy Awards will do the same with It Was Just an Accident this year.
In light of the US’s abrupt and incessant attacks on Iran—Trump’s reckless violation of international laws and complete disregard for foreign countries—the nomination of It was Just an Accident poses a recurring moral dilemma to the Academy. The Western world is once again forced to confront its financial entanglement and direct contribution to the dire scenarios of the film. The Academy Awards are not only increasingly diluted by capitalist corruption and power struggle, but also a deliberate political tactic that allows the Western world to say: at least we gave them an Oscar.
Photo by Jennifer 8. Lee on Openverse.