00:00Looking back at the Palme d'Or winner, the Iranian dissident Jafar Pahani and his film It Was Just an Accident.
00:06David, he's not a household name, but he's a very revered director.
00:11Tell us, for people who don't know anything at all about him, what's his background?
00:15Well, as you said, It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d'Or, and it's the first film since 1997 to do so,
00:22and at the time it was Taste of Cherry by Abbas Kiyostami.
00:26And Jafar Pahani is one of Iran's just greatest filmmaker, alongside the likes of Mohammed Rasulov, for instance,
00:36and he is somebody who has clashed with the repressive Iranian authorities for many, many years now.
00:42He was placed under house arrest, arrested for endangering national security, and banned from travel.
00:49And in 2022, he was imprisoned for supporting his fellow filmmaker, Mohammed Rasulov,
00:58and later went on a hunger strike and was released a year later.
01:02And it was just an accident. It's his first film since then.
01:06David, you've had the chance to see the film. Tell us, what's it about?
01:09It tells the story of a family, a father and mother and their daughter,
01:14who are in a car who accidentally run over a dog, and the car breaks down and fortuitously breaks down in front of a shop
01:23where one person there offers to help out, and another person there, Bahid,
01:29seems to have a very visceral reaction to the father coming into the shop.
01:35And he recognizes a noise, which seems to come from the father's prosthetic leg.
01:42And he believes that this is the man who is an intelligence officer, or who was an intelligence officer,
01:50who previously tortured him.
01:53And because of this uncertainty, but this very visceral reaction he has,
01:59he kidnaps the father and plans to bury him alive.
02:03But because of the protestations from the father figure, the seeds of doubt are sown.
02:12So what he does is goes off and seeks help and advice from other victims of this potential monster.
02:20People like a photographer, a bride-to-be and her husband,
02:24and this live wire of a man who is the only one who can positively identify the potential torturer
02:31because he has seen him without being blindfolded like the others were, therefore the doubt.
02:40And essentially it's a film about the price of revenge,
02:44whether you should use violence to combat violence,
02:48what it does to your own humanity,
02:51how you can escape the trauma that has been inflicted,
02:54and whether that's at all possible.
02:57And it is, like I said, a taut, a gripping film, utterly engrossing.
03:03And one that surprised me in the sense that it's actually very humorous.
03:08There's some slapstick elements to this.
03:10And it is something which is rather remarkable in the sense that it talks about these very powerful things,
03:18these very dark things,
03:20but at the same time does so in a way that recalls Waiting for Godot,
03:24which is mentioned in the film,
03:26but also as if Waiting for Godot was spliced with Weekend at Bernie's.
03:30And I'll say one more thing without spoiling the film at all.
03:34Not only is it a very richly deserved poem,
03:37but the ending left my jaw on the floor.
03:42It's one of those moments, it's a very simply filmed scene
03:46and uses sound to a devastating effect.
03:50And it is almost like a horror film.
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