BTS It Was Just An Accident

IBC

The Cannes Palme d’Or-winning critique of Iran’s police state was made in secret as an act of defiance. IBC365 sits down with the film’s Editor Amir Etminan to learn more about the fearless filmmakers’ process.

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Criticising the Iranian state in Iran risks intimidation, imprisonment, or worse, but filmmakers continue to defy censorship. The latest to achieve recognition is the Palme d'Or-winning drama It Was Just an Accident.

“Just because this film is about not being able to speak or work freely in Iran today doesn’t mean we should stop attempting to work or speak freely,” says Amir Etminan, the 42-year-old Iranian who edited the feature for Director Jafar Panahi. “Making this type of film in Iran actually fights against those issues.”

Panahi has been making politically charged films since 2000, when his third feature, The Circle, was openly critical of the treatment of women under the Islamist regime. His films, including The White Balloon (1995), Offside (2006), and No Bears (2022), consistently win awards. Yet, he has been imprisoned, banned from travel, and placed under house arrest for most of the past decade.  

The tragi-comedy It Was Just An Accident is judged to be his most overtly anti-government tale yet. At its heart, the story presents a moral dilemma: what would you do if you found your former jailer, and how could you be sure it was them anyway?

Co-financed by French company Les Films Pelleas, the film is France’s submission for Best International Feature at the 2026 Oscars and was made under the noses of Iranian officials. 

“Unfortunately, in Iran, especially for independent cinema, we are used to making films secretly,” comments Etminan, who previously cut No Bears. “We’ve normalised it. Mr Panahi is a very popular and well-known person in Iran, so we already had this fear and stress that there would be problems.” 

Pulling it off

First, the team obtained fake permission documentation to make a short film under another crew member’s name. The cast and crew were kept to a minimum of just 20 people, with several scenes taking place inside a van to disguise their activity. Cinematographer Amin Jafari shot it all using RED Komodo, a small cine camera that produces significantly larger files than a cell phone. Etminan was on set every single day, acting as a digital imaging technician (DIT) and an editor. 

“Every day I would take the memory cards home, make a copy of them, and convert the files to proxies before giving the cards back to Panahi to hide,” he says. 

Etminan used a modest 2020 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage to edit the full film entirely offline. He often worked 18 hours a day with no editing assistant to create the proxy files from the RED footage. 

“Because the situation was very risky and secret, I only had a small laptop and a tiny SSD so as not to draw attention.” 

Nonetheless, on the 26^th and penultimate day of shooting, Iranian security police came to visit the team. Luckily, the RED Komodo was already mounted on a car and being driven away from the set with Director Panahi and the actors. However, Etminan and several others were caught, and the laptop containing the full, edited film was found in the back of another vehicle.

“The police opened the back of the truck and grabbed the backpack, which had the laptop inside. They started to question us and wanted us to stop shooting.” 

Next to the bag was a pair of cameras that were props for the character of a wedding photographer in the film. Etminan made exaggerated efforts to protect the cameras in a bid to divert police attention away from the laptop. 

“The police thought these cameras were the main cameras we were shooting the film with. They asked me to open the cameras and tell them what information was on them. I said I didn’t know and that the batteries were not working, which, fortunately, they were not. The police demanded the memory card from the camera, which I gave them, so they went away satisfied that they’d taken something from the set that they thought was the main card of the film.” No arrests were made. “They came with 20 people and couldn’t find a single frame.” 

A few days later, with the offline edit complete, Etminan transferred the finished cut to an 8TB SSD card in Tehran and handed it to someone “completely unrelated to cinema” who then transferred the files over the internet to France. 

In France, the edit decision list (EDL) was conformed to the raw footage with VFX and colour grading applied. Etminan supervised all of this via a video call from Tehran. 

DoP Jafari kept the number of takes to a minimum to reduce the risk of discovery and to avoid having to handle and secrete large volumes of data. 

“One reason I went to the set each day was to calculate the length of every shot,” Etminan elucidates. “I had to tell them whether the shot we were filming fitted with the shot from before and afterwards. We would calculate that on set for every scene across the whole film using notes that were all in my head.” 

He adds: “Mr Panahi was so accurate that after the rough cut, we didn't have more than 10 minutes of unused footage leftover.” 

Flip the script

The drama itself deals with weighty moral issues about justice, torture, and forgiveness, but set in deliberately absurd scenarios, which would not be out of place in a Coen Brothers’ fiction. 

Etminan explains that such “bitter comedy” is a coping mechanism. 

“Real life is a combination of comedy and tragedy,” he says. “In the worst situations and the most bitter part of our lives, we retain our humour. That kind of saves us and helps us survive.” 

Much of the dialogue in the film comes directly from political prisoners’ experiences in Iran.  

“Comedy also helps the storytelling. Psychologically, using comedic moments and small jokes helps us to avoid the complete darkness of such a harsh reality.” 

Similarly, the tale begins by evoking the audience’s sympathy for a father who accidentally hits a dog while driving his family home. This incident means their car needs an emergency repair at a nearby garage, where we are introduced to a suspicious mechanic, Vahid. From this point, the roles of victim and villain reverse. 

According to Etminan, this is achieved through the writer-director’s approach to story. “In Panahir’s films, the camera won't move before the characters or before the characters’ actions,” Etminan explicates. “Instead, the character moves the camera from one spot to another.” 

In the first few minutes of the film, Eghbal is the main character, and the audience gets to know his family. The camera is motivated by him. Then, Panahir puts the focus on the character of Vahid, a mechanic. Vahid then becomes the one who motivates the camera to move from one spot to another. 

“Even when all our characters are inside the car, we do not move the camera outside the car because Vahid has not moved outside the car. These shifts in perspective between protagonist and antagonist are the classic forms of storytelling, but in the independent cinema of Iran, we prefer not to use those classic forms.” 

Facing the future

The risks of making such films are borne by everyone involved, Etminan included. In 2022, after making the feature No End, directed by Nader Saeivar about the Iranian secret police, the editor was forced to flee the country to live in Turkey. 

Several times he has been interrogated by the police, but says these interviews weren’t “harsh”. 

“The situation for students and young people in Iran is much worse. In general, the behaviour of the police in Iran towards people working in cinema is a bit more polite, because they know it won’t look good for them when news of their [detainment or suppression] is broadcast internationally.” 

After Panahi was arrested and sentenced to six years in 2022 for ‘propaganda against the regime’ (for expressing solidarity with fellow Iranian filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mustafa Al-Ahmad), filmmakers at the Venice Film Festival and around the world voiced their own support.  

Awarding It Was Just An Accident with the Palme d’Or has been seen as the international film community’s continued support for artists’ work against state oppression everywhere. 

“[Panahi’s] persecution has caused global backlash. He’s become a thorn in their side,” Etminan says. “Personally, I still travel to Iran whenever I want. I go there. I come back again. Honestly, we’re not afraid of repression or prison. After [experiencing it], you get used to it and you stop caring. 

“What I learned from Mr Panahi is that this is our country. If one day someone needs to leave, it's not us, it's them. It's the regime.”