Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been confronted with a strange task in recent weeks: promoting his Oscar-nominated movie as his home country erupts in unrest and war.
“On the surface, I am in a celebration,” Panahi said, speaking through a translator over Zoom from New York on Tuesday morning. “But from the inside, I feel differently.”
Panahi, 65, secretly shot “It Was Just An Accident” in Iran, where authorities oversee the media and filmmakers must get their scripts approved to get film permits. The film, a revenge drama shaped by his time in the notoriously cruel Evin Prison in Tehran, is nominated in the best original screenplay and international film categories for the upcoming Oscars.
The filmmaker has been eager to share “It Was Just An Accident” with audiences, saying he considers himself “like a witness” for the events in Iran. But, he said, “when we accepted to have this campaign for the film, we never thought about these days.”
The awards season has been anything but glamorous for Panahi, whose mother and son live in Iran. He has spent months on the road promoting his film, while also struggling to absorb the fast-moving news that directly impacts his life.
“No matter how much you try to keep yourself updated from afar, it’s not the same as being there,” he said. “And you don’t know how much of it is true, how much is not true.”
In January, Panahi’s Golden Globes experience was overshadowed by a video he saw on his phone while sitting in the line of traffic going through security for the show. It was footage from Kahrizak, a morgue near Tehran that was overflowing with bodies after the Iranian regime began a crackdown on protests that left thousands dead and injured.
“Security did not allow us to leave our cars, and I had a sense of suffocation,” Panahi said. “When we arrived and [red carpet reporters] wanted to talk to me, I really did not even have the ability to speak. I kept stepping out and trying to create a balance in my mind. I kept going out to smoke.”
After the ceremony, he skipped the parties because he said he “really just could not continue.”
Less than two months later, Panahi was traveling from Barcelona to New York to tape an interview on “The Daily Show” when he learned that the U.S. and Israel had launched a joint attack on Iran.
“Maybe I had just checked my bags, I can’t remember,” he said. “I said to myself, I need to keep going for the next few days.”
With a near-total internet blackout in Iran and communications severely disrupted since Saturday’s attack, Panahi said that he was still trying to get in touch with his family there as of Tuesday morning.
In the days since the war in the Middle East began, there have been some glimmers of hope among Iranians, particularly after news broke that the strikes had killed Iran’s hard-line Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled the country with an iron grip for 36 years.
Panahi, along with 16 other artists and activists including his Oscar-nominated co-screenwriter Mehdi Mahmoudian, signed a statement in January condemning Khamenei for authorizing the “mass and systematic killing of citizens.” Iranian authorities quickly arrested Mahmoudian, who was in Tehran at the time, for signing the letter.
“Like many other people who suffered in this period, hearing about this news made me both happy and sad,” Panahi said of Khamenei’s death. “In the last statement that we issued, we said that he should step aside and he should be tried. And we are sorry that we are no longer going to have a trial for him.”
He said he is largely relying on Persian language news sources to follow events — though not everything has been on his radar. During the course of the interview, the director learned that the Israeli army had ordered residents to evacuate the neighborhood in Tehran where Evin Prison is located. The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, recently issued a statement calling for Iranian prisoners to be “protected and prioritized.”
The news made Panahi immediately worry for the safety of the prisoners, including the “large number” of those who were detained after the recent protests and those who “have been incarcerated for many years.”
“What is going to happen to them?” he said. “I don’t know, and we really need to think about that. I very much hope that the situation does not push the regime to use these prisoners as human shields.”
One day, Panahi said he’ll try to process what’s unfolding in Iran through his craft.
“What’s happening right now, of course, is going to have its effect on me, and one day it’s going to reveal itself in one of my films.”
When Panahi does eventually return to Iran, he will likely face imprisonment again.
In December, the government sentenced him “in absentia, to one year of imprisonment, two years of prohibition from leaving the country, and a ban on membership in any political or social groups or organizations, on the charge of propaganda against the regime,” his lawyer said in a statement on X.
Flights to Iran are currently cancelled due to the conflict, but Panahi wants his press tour to end after the March 15 Oscars in L.A.
“I really do hope that there can be a way,” Panahi said of flying back to Iran. “Perhaps one reason I’m here is that my presence is going to compensate for the presence of all the people who cannot be here. And in these conversations, in these events, I could perhaps give their message to the world.”
