‘As far as I’m concerned, this regime has fallen’: Director Jafar Panahi on Iran’s deadly protests

By Thomas Page, CNN

(CNN) — Iran was two weeks into its fiercest protests in years when Iranian director Jafar Panahi sat down for an interview.

“As I’m speaking to you now, my mind and heart are there,” Panahi said by video from Los Angeles on January 8, where he was promoting his latest film “It Was Just an Accident,” a Tehran-set thriller that is a fixture on the awards circuit this year.

“I think what is happening this time is quite different,” Panahi said. The director would know. For years he has faced the brunt of Iran’s regime, from multiple arrests and imprisonments to a ban on filmmaking — none of which has stopped him from making films, nor providing a vital perspective on his country.

Protests sparked by Iran’s economic crisis have engulfed cities across the country, prompting a brutal government response that escalated sharply the day after Jafari spoke to CNN. According to a US-based rights group, at least 2,403 protestors have been killed and over 18,000 arrested.

“As far as I’m concerned, this regime has fallen in any possible aspect that you could imagine,” Panahi said, speaking through a translator. “It has fallen politically, economically, ideologically and even environmentally. It’s fallen apart. What is remaining is only a shell, and we have to see how long it’s going to last.”

“It Was Just an Accident” is a movie with one eye on a possible future. In the film, a chance meeting prompts a former prisoner to kidnap a man he believes was his interrogator. Doubt pushes him to consult former inmates, all of whom were tormented by the same character, and differ on what to do with him. Revenge or forgiveness? The moral dilemma circling a single man’s fate acts as a metaphor for a nation.

“What mattered to me was the future and after the regime,” Panahi said. “Is the cycle of violence going to continue in the future, or are we going to prepare ourselves from now to create a better situation for ourselves?”

“Everything in the film is an excuse or a pretext to get to this question: Is the cycle of violence going to continue, or is it going to end?” he added.

Panahi cited liberated Europe after World War II, and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the USSR, when local Nazi and Soviet collaborators were made examples of. “I kept thinking whether this is going to happen in my country,” he pondered, “or if we’re going to be more reasonable,” he said.

He recalled the moment Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison was struck during the twelve day conflict between Israel and Iran in June 2025.

A missile hit the ward where Panahi himself had been imprisoned. “The gates fell and the walls were destroyed, and the prisoners rushed out to save their lives.”

When the ward next door — where interrogators were gathered — was also hit, the prisoners, “without a moment of hesitation” went “to the bodies that were caught under the rubble, and they started pulling them out.”

“It wasn’t because they had forgiven their interrogators who were now caught under the rubble. It was because their humanistic sense had prevailed,” he said.

And that, presumably, will never die? I asked.

“Exactly,” he said. “Because if it dies, humans will die.”

Cinema of dissent

Until recently, an interview with Panahi was impossible.

The director was first detained in Iran in 2010, in connection with a film he made about the disputed 2009 election. He was sentenced to six years in prison but was released on bail after a period of hunger strike, though his sentence still banned him from traveling abroad, talking to the media and filmmaking for 20 years.

In 2022, Panahi was ordered to serve the 2010 prison sentence after he was detained while enquiring about fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulouf and Mostafa Aleahmad, who had been arrested amid a crackdown on dissent in Iran, per Reuters. He was released in 2023 after seven months in Evin Prison following another hunger strike.

“It Was Just an Accident,” his first movie since his travel and filmmaking ban was lifted, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last May, making Panahi the only living director to have won top prizes at the Venice, Berlin and Cannes film festivals. It was nominated for four Golden Globes and now has the Oscars in sight.

At home, attacks against him continue. Last month, an Iran court sentenced Panahi in absentia to one year in prison and a two-year travel ban, accusing him of “creating propaganda against the political system,” the BBC reported. He was abroad promoting his film when the sentence was revealed. Panahi had an appeal hearing on January 4, but he was still waiting on news from his lawyer, he said.

“It’s really because of the campaign that I’m still here,” he said from Los Angeles, referring to awards season, “because everyone is working really hard on it and I’ve made a commitment. It’s not ethical of me to just ruin everyone’s efforts and leave.”

Panahi said once awards season concludes, he plans to return to Iran.

An inventive, self-reflexive director, necessity has forced Panahi to stretch the boundaries of film and contort it into new forms. Following his filmmaking ban, “This is Not a Film” was shot on an iPhone while he was under house arrest. In “Taxi,” he drove around Tehran in a cab fitted with dash cams. And in “No Bears,” Panahi starred as a metafictional director trying to shoot a movie in exile. His guerilla filmography is both a thrilling exploration of cinema’s elasticity and an essential document on crafting personal freedoms in the face of oppression.

Many of his films read as acts of dissent simply through their creation, but the director describes himself as a “socially-engaged” filmmaker rather than a political one, responding to his surroundings.

“It Was Just an Accident” — his most straightforward narrative feature in decades — takes a more confrontational approach to Iran’s regime than some of his previous films. “I tried not to get carried away or overexcited or emotional,” he said.

The same cannot be said for his characters, some of whom seek revenge. By the end of the film, the man suspected of being an interrogator is a wretch, pleading to a former prisoner, “I swear I’m just like you.”

I asked Panahi if he had been able to find sympathy for individuals working for the regime.

“Honestly, when a system itself is dysfunctional, individuals who work it are only like pieces of a big machine,” he said.

“The issue is not me being sympathetic to them or feeling bad for them,” he said.

Panahi recalled speaking with lower ranking prison workers while he was inside. “Anytime they found us in a less crowded spot, or when they thought that they’re not being overheard, they would always have some affinity with us political prisoners,” he said. “They would usually ask us what we think is going to happen, and whether the Islamic Republic is going to fall or not.”

Naturally, “It Was Just an Accident” is unavailable in Iran. The film’s Oscar campaign is propelled by US distributor Neon and France, which submitted the film as its entry for best international feature film due to a co-production deal.

Given the uncertainty that awaits Panahi after the Academy Awards, it felt out of place to ask if he had his next film in mind. Instead, I asked, given the difficult circumstances under which he operates, is he able to take pleasure from the filmmaking process as it’s happening?

Panahi recalled his younger self, who would scrape together pocket money to see a film once every one or two weeks in Iran. The same “chubby” kid was invited to act in an 8mm film, but he wanted to do more, though the cinematographer wouldn’t let him look through the viewfinder. It lit a fire under the future director until he could own a camera of his own. Cinema, he said, was “sanctified.”

“When you work with so much hardship behind you … the entire joy of the world is in that moment when you are working on cinema. And you have to do it correctly and properly,” he said.

“When they gave me a 20-year sentence that banned (me) from working, I realized that there was no way I cannot be making films. And the films that I made were all the result of that same passion and love that I had for cinema.”

“I believe that a filmmaker will feel alive when they are able to do what they like,” said Panahi, “and that is creating.”

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