Cannes 2025 provided, as the world’s premiere film festival always does, the bulk of the rest of the year’s programming for Americans outside of New York and Los Angeles. Over the summer, there was Eddington and The Phoenician Scheme, and with fall comes a bigger batch: Die My Love, Sentimental Value, The Mastermind, The Secret Agent, and, on Netflix, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague (which I haven’t seen and can’t imagine tops Linklater’s Blue Moon, too plain and digital as it is). Those are just some of the films that were in competition—a competition which, unlike the Oscars, is hard to predict. Unlike a mostly static and disengaged voting bloc like the Academy, Cannes enlists nine people, including a president, to work out the winner themselves. These are filmmakers from all over the world and every facet of the medium: 2025 had Juliette Binoche as President, with directors Hong Sang-soo, Dieudo Hamadi, Payal Kapadia, and Carlos Reygadas; actors Halle Berry, Alba Rohrwacher, and Jeremy Strong; and writer Leïla Slimani. Past winners don’t always get a free pass or even decent treatment, like Julia Ducournau, whose Alpha was acquired by Neon and inexplicably dumped into two theaters last month, just four years after she won the Palme with Titane.
This year’s Palme d’Or winner should’ve been a lay-up from the beginning. It Was Just an Accident, directed by embattled Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi in secret and barely smuggled out of his country in time for the festival, is no revelation, nor revolution, but a fine, relatively simple film about the ups and downs of revenge. Vahid Mobasseri plays Vahid, an Azerbaijani car mechanic introduced after the first scene, where we see a man run over a dog by accident while driving with his wife and daughter. After speaking with the man, played by Ebrahim Azizi, Vahid becomes convinced that he is Eghbal, a prison guard who tormented Vahid and his friends years ago. Besides the voice, the man has a prosthetic leg, just like Eghbal, nicknamed “Pegleg” by his victims. Vahid follows and kidnaps the man and buries him blindfolded in the desert, all while the man insists he’s innocent. He even allows Vahid to remove his prosthetic, and we see something rare in cinema: a long, lingering shot of the limb, ending just before the knee. No tricks here—it’s the most powerful shot in the film.
The rest of It Was Just an Accident is thoroughly middlebrow, wrestling with familiar moral dilemmas and obvious evils. Even its ambivalence towards revenge is readymade and unoriginal: haven’t we seen some variation of the final shot (and sound) in many, many movies before? Add onto that the monologuing towards the end that, however forcefully delivered, tethers the movie to the ground. Vahid quickly assembles a group of his former cellmates, some of whom are more eager to torture and kill Eghbal than others. Shiva (Mariam Afshari) is spooked by Vahid’s offer at first, but when it’s just her and a tied up Eghbal, she lets him have it; Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr) is considerably more hostile and volatile, ready to take a blowtorch to his former captor. Both get their moment to hector Eghbal, who swears his innocence before inexplicably admitting it’s him, and then he gets his moment to say, what else, “I was just trying to make a living,” paraphrasing the most famous line from the Nuremberg trials just as a new movie of that morally cut and dry time is out in theaters as well.
I’ve seen Panahi’s film dismissed as a “Sidney Lumet shout-a-thon,” which isn’t a stretch, but in a country as repressed as Iran, there’s necessarily more weight to the material, however embellished. Lumet himself said that 12 Angry Men was “a fantasy” of how the justice system works in America, and perhaps Panahi is playing fast and loose when he has the group release Eghbal free of consequences, but these aren’t smug, self-satisfied liberals trying to make something for everyone. Shiva, for instance, often appears without a hijab, illegal in Iran for the character and the actress playing her. One doesn’t imagine a bright future for a group of Americans who kidnap a cop and let him go after some relatively light torture, but they won’t vanish without a trace (probably). It Was Just an Accident has everyone risking their lives to make simple, broadly palatable moral points, and however “safe” the actual issues are, you’re watching people who deal with real oppression every day, and when they’re paranoid or let loose, it’s, again, necessarily more powerful than the largely deracinated lives of most Americans.
Compare Panahi’s film to Anatomy of a Fall, 2023’s Palme winner: Justine Triet’s French courtroom drama never resolved its central question, and did go deeper than most films about ailing marriages, men and women, and memory. But it wandered, because it had the time and the space to wander—Panahi has no such luxury, only escaping prison two years ago after going on hunger strike. It Was Just an Accident isn’t frenzied or especially minimal, but there’s an urgency and a directness that’s undoubtedly a result of the conditions the film was made under. If you don’t make your days on a Hollywood movie, producers probably won’t hire you again; if you run out of money making an independent feature, good luck getting any more; if you film somewhere outside without a permit, you might get stopped and told to fuck off, or maybe given a ticket. If Panahi and his cast and crew were busted, they’d probably all still be in jail right now. Indefinitely. Of course he won the Palme—how can you beat risking your life to make a movie?
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith