PEN America and Film Forum are thrilled to present a screening of this year’s Palme d’Or winner, It Was Just an Accident. In the first film by the provocative Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi since liberation from imprisonment and a filmmaking ban, he devises a darkly comic revenge thriller with a deceptively simple premise: A family has a car accident, then pulls into an auto shop. The mechanic, Vahid, thinks he recognizes the driver—who walks with a dragging prosthetic leg—and suspects that he is the man who tortured him in prison. Vahid kidnaps him, preparing to bury him alive, but—is he certain that this man is his torturer? Vahid gathers other survivors to verify his suspicion, with escalating consequences, as Panahi mounts incisive critiques of societal corruption and the afterburn of tyrannical rule.
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This open caption screening will be introduced by Karin Deutsch Karlekar, Director of Director, Writers at Risk, PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Center, and Hanna Khosravi, Program Manager, Research at PEN America. The run time is 103 minutes.
