Iranian dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday for his revenge thriller It Was Just an Accident, handing the festival's top prize to a director who had been barred from leaving Iran for more than 15 years. Cate Blanchett presented the award to Panahi, who three years ago was imprisoned in Iran before going on a hunger strike, the AP reports. For a decade and a half, he has made films clandestinely in his native country, including one film (This Is Not a Film) in his living room, and another (Taxi) set in a car.
The crowd rose in a thunderous standing ovation for the filmmaker, who immediately threw up his arms and leaned back in his seat in disbelief before applauding his collaborators and the audience around him. Onstage, Panahi was cheered by Cannes jury President Juliette Binoche, who in 2010 in Cannes held up Panahi's name to honor the director when he was under house arrest. Panahi told the gathering that what matters most is freedom in his country. "Let us join forces," he said. "No one should dare tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, what we should do or what we should not do."
It Was Just an Accident was inspired by Panahi's experience in prison. In the film, a group of former prisoners encounter the man who terrorized them in jail and weigh whether to kill him. Panahi was held in Tehran's Evin Prison after going there to inquire about the then-jailed filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulo. Panahi was released in 2023 after going on a hunger strike. "The film springs from a feeling of resistance, survival, which is absolutely necessary today," Binoche told reporters after the ceremony. "Art will always win. What is human will always win." (A power outage disrupted the festival earlier in the day.)
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