Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi made his first in-person appearance at the Cannes Film Festival in two decades this week to debut his new film “It Was Just an Accident,” and now he’s walking away with distribution from one of the hottest studios around. Neon has picked up North American rights to the drama, which debuted this week to rave reviews as Panahi drew from his own experience being detained and imprisoned by the Iranian government to tell a tale of revenge.
Neon will release “It Was Just an Accident” in North American theaters later this year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In his rave review for TheWrap, Steve Pond hailed the movie as one of Panahi’s best. It follows a group of individuals who abduct a man they believe to have been an interrogator at Iranian prisoners.
“The bracing thing about ‘It Was Just an Accident’ is that it has married Panahi’s wit and humanism with real anger; if many of his previous films lulled you into realizing his points about oppression and injustice, this one is downright confrontational, from the moment its action begins with a man driving away from a city in the dead of night and accidentally hitting and killing a dog,” he wrote.
The director returned to Cannes for the first time since an Iranian court gave him a prison sentence and a 20-year ban on making movies in 2010 for making what they called “propaganda.” Despite an additional prison sentence in 2022, Panahi has been deemed to have served his sentence — and while he still makes movies clandestinely because he could never get the required government approval for the kind of films he wants to make, he was now free to walk the red carpet in Cannes.
This is the second pickup for Neon this festival, as the studio also acquired the Wagner Moura thriller “The Secret Agent.”
Neon previously released Panahi’s 2021 film “The Year of the Everlasting Storm.”
Neon has released the last five Palme d’Or winners, beginning with “Parasite” in 2019 and continuing with “Titane,” “Triangle of Sadness,” “Anatomy of a Fall” and “Anora.” It came into this festival with two films in the main competition, Julia Ducournau’s “Alpha” and Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” and then acquired “The Secret Agent.” But “It Was Just an Accident” may give the company its best shot to extend its Palme streak to six.
At the end of his review, Pond wrote, “it’s hard to bet against (the) possibility (of Panahi winning a top award). The figure of the director standing on the stage after being banned for so long is simply too irresistible, and the movie is simply too good.”
