It Was Just an Accident, A Separation, The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Iran’s relationship with world cinema dates back to the beginning of the last century, when Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar travelled to France in 1900 and was astonished by the recent invention of cinematograph. When he came back he sent Mirza Ibrahim Khan, a photographer, to learn this new technology and bring it to Iran. Since then cinema has been part of Iranian art. Iranian cinema was introduced to an international audience in 1963 when the short film The House Is Black, directed by Forough Farrokhzad, was awarded the Grand Prize at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in 1963, but the major international leap for Iranian cinema came after the 1979 Revolution, when realist Iranian filmmakers – Dariush Mehrjui, Majid Majidi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami – started to participate in prestigious European film festivals. Kiarostami’s Where Is My Friend’s House? won Bronze Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 1989. It typified the new wave of Iranian cinema, which quickly gained recognition from audience and critics, by discussing power in a subtle and symbolic, illustrating the feeling of a young child towards his aggressive school teachers in a remote rural part of Iran. However the most important step on the Iranian route in international cinema happened when Kairostami won the prestigious Palm d’Or award in 1997 for his masterpiece The Taste of Cherries. The filmmaker follows the protagonist on his trip searching for someone to accompanying on his way to committing suicide, a concept that would be rejected by the religious rulings governing society. This wasn’t the first time an Iranian filmmaker had faced a major challenge with censorship, and of course not the last. The film was banned from travelling to the festival, then released a few days before the opening before winning the award.
In 1999, Majidi’s Children of Heaven became the first Iranian film to be nominated for the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Foreign Language Film whole the political tension between the US and Iran was still near the surface since the American hostage crisis. Again the plot is very simple, focusing on a boy who loses his sister’s shoes. The family is very poor so they share the boy’s shoes, which the girl will wear to school in the morning while he wears them in the afternoon. The film describes the educational struggles of poor communities due to the scarcity of schools. Classes are divided into two or sometimes three periods to accommodate the large number of students; in the morning, in the afternoon, and sometimes in the evening.
The 21st century brought forth a new generation of Iranian filmmakers who added to Iranian cinema: among others, Jafar Panahi, Asghar Farhadi and Mohammad Rasoulof. They managed to create new, bold and artistic stories. Although most Iranian filmmakers had faced obstacles, this new wave of filmmakers confronted even stronger censorial restrictions and judicial injustice.
In 2000, Panahi’s The Circle won Venice’s Golden Lion. The film shows the struggle of various women in a sexist society, especially against the police and the security forces. Panahi managed to build his narrative following different women while they were facing ordinary challenges, with some of them recently released from prison. One of them happened to work as a prostitute in Tehran and might face massive aggression from the authorities. Panahi who continued his courageous approach was himself a victim of the legal system when he received a ban on filmmaking for 20 years, charged with “propaganda against the state”, then the sentence was reduced. During the ban, in 2015, Panahi posed as a taxi driver and secretly made a movie about social challenges in Iran, and his film, Taxi, won the Golden Bear in the Berlinale.
In 2011, Farhadi won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale for his film Separation, which tells the story of a couple on the verge of separation, though their love remains. A series of events complicates the drama, and the script captures these humane details and complexities. However, the film’s underlying theme is the entanglement of these events with the rigid structure of the Islamic judicial system, which lacks flexibility and upholds the law rather than its spirit. This was the first time an Iranian film won the Foreign Film Academy Award in 2012.
The past few years witnessed an upsurge of deep, humane Iranian films like Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig which won the Grand Jury Award at Cannes in 2024. Rasoulof fled secretly from Iran to avoid an eight-year prison sentence, travelling through Turkey to attend the 77th round of the festival. It seems the judicial system which is not independent of the political authority felt that The Seed of the Sacred Fig may have contained ideas against the Islamic law. In general most of the female characters do not wear hijab in the film, and the Mahsa Amini protests and the wave of voices rejection mandatory hijab were still fresh. The film itself depicts injustice against the father of the family who works as a judge. He represents the authority of the family and the state, and he has a bloody and brutal end. Rasoulof’s previous film, There is No Evil, which also won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, was against capital punishment. The film is divided into shorter stories, each representing an aspect of execution, which is meted out to opponents of the regime as much as criminals. As a result of the two films Rasoulof has been blacklisted and may not be able to go back to Iran.
In 2025 Panahi won the Palm d’Or for It Was Just an Accident. The film, which is currently on view at Cinema Zawya, focuses on a family: a father, a mother and a very young daughter. This pre-credit scene is very significant, showing the daughter’s anger when her father hits a stray dog and kills it, rejecting her mother’s claim that this is God’s will. The scene shows her holding a stuffed dog, but the more salient detail is the sound of the father’s prosthetic leg. The car breaks down outside a shop or warehouse, and one of the two workers there, Vahid, hides, terrified by the sound of the leg; it is the sound the intelligence officer who tortured Vahid while he was incarcerated, “Iqbal”, made. Panahi doesn’t give a reason for the arrest of Vahid and his friends, though it is clear it has to do with politics. Vahid then reveals that he has kidnapped Iqbal but wants to be 100 percent sure it was him before he kills him. Although the plot of the film is serious, indeed tragic, Panahi walks a thin line between comedy and suspense as Vahid finds his fellow inmates.
In the official competition of the 79th Cannes Festival this week, Farhadi is participating with Parallel Tales. Again another Iranian filmmaker competing for some of the most prestigious awards in world cinema, it seems this new work was made outside Iran. No one can predict when the conflict between the US and Iran will end, and the same is true of Iranian. Logical and legitimate questions are raised about freedom of creativity and speech in Iran after the war. Whether the hardliners in the regime will remain and tighten their control over art or more space will be made for artists and thinkers remains to be seen, especially since Rasoulof, Farhadi and Makhmalbaf along with filmmaker daughter Samira and wife Marzieh Meshkini have all left the country.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 28 May, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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