Following its premiere at Cannes Film Festival, It Was Just an Accident - winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year - went on to open the Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival immediately setting the tone for the program.
Text: Diana Martirosyan
Importantly, Jafar Panahi himself was physically present - a fact that carries particular weight given the years he was unableCanne to leave Iran due to state-imposed restrictions.
Armenian audiences are deeply familiar with Iranian cinema and with Panahi in particular. Given the geographical and cultural proximity, as well as an ongoing awareness of political realities in the region, the film did not arrive in a vacuum. It was received within a shared context.
Panahi’s relationship with Cannes is long-standing. It was here that his debut, The White Balloon, won the Caméra d’Or, effectively introducing him to the international stage. He returned many times, although after 2010 he was unable to attend due to a state-imposed travel ban, alongside restrictions on filmmaking and public activity - restrictions he repeatedly defied. His recent arrival in Cannes therefore carries symbolic weight: a return not only of a filmmaker, but of a presence long kept at a distance.
The idea for It Was Just an Accident emerged during Panahi’s imprisonment between July 2022 and February 2023, which ended only after a hunger strike. Following his release, conversations with former prisoners informed the film’s central premise. Shot clandestinely, without official permission, and with actresses appearing largely without hijab, the film continues Panahi’s long-standing practice of working under and against constraint.
At its core, It Was Just an Accident is built as a suspense-driven moral inquiry, more tense than much of Panahi’s earlier work, and at times approaching the structure of a thriller.
A man believed to be a former prison guard, possibly responsible for torture, falls into the hands of ex-prisoners. The problem is simple and devastating: they are not sure it is him. During their detention, they were blindfolded. Memory is unreliable. Recognition is uncertain.
From this emerges the film’s central tension - not just is he guilty?, but what does one do with that uncertainty?
Even if he is the man they are looking for, another question arises: they are not killers. They hesitate. They argue. Each character carries a different moral threshold, and the group slowly fractures under the weight of decision-making. Justice, revenge, doubt - none of these concepts remain stable.
Panahi constructs the film almost in real time, creating an atmosphere of proximity that places the viewer uncomfortably close. We are not participants, but we are not distant either. We feel the heat, the dust, the noise of the streets, the sudden appearance of police, the tension embedded in everyday movement. A phone rings, a child calling his father, and suddenly the figure at the center of suspicion becomes something else entirely.
This is where the film shifts from premise to something deeper. The moral dilemma expands outward, reflecting not just individual responsibility, but a broader societal condition. In this sense, the film echoes both Panahi’s earlier work and the wider landscape of contemporary Iranian cinema - where ambiguity, ethics, and systemic pressure intersect.
If Panahi’s film operates through moral tension, Morad Mostafa’s directorial debut Aisha Can’t Fly Away (which had its world premiere at the Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section) moves in a different direction - more diffuse, more allegorical, yet shaped by similarly urgent concerns.
Also presented at Golden Apricot’s Secondary competition program also following its Cannes trajectory, Aisha Can’t Fly Away, which received the FIPRESCI prize, is an ambitious international co-production that has clearly travelled a long development path through labs, residencies, and co-production markets. That process is visible in the film itself: it carries the marks of multiple influences and intentions.
At its core, the film is a social drama with subtle elements of body horror - not literal, but metaphorical. The story follows Aisha, an undocumented Sudanese migrant in Cairo, navigating a life shaped by precarity, humiliation, and systemic neglect. She works in exploitative conditions, lives on the margins, supports her family from afar, and remains entangled in structures she cannot escape.
The director has framed the film as an exploration of internal transformation under prolonged instability - less about external events than about what sustained pressure does to a person over time. Gradually, something shifts. Not dramatically, but almost imperceptibly. Aisha begins to move toward a more instinct-driven mode of existence.
The recurring image of the ostrich, both surreal and strangely grounded, functions as a symbolic anchor, suggesting denial, adaptation, and a quiet psychological dislocation. Thematically, the film aligns with a broader tendency in contemporary Arab cinema, where migration, displacement, and invisible labour have become central concerns. The film positions itself within this discourse, attempting to translate structural violence into lived experience.
At the same time, it remains somewhat uneven. Its minimalism creates atmosphere, but also introduces distance. The film is thoughtful, constructed, and thematically engaged, yet it may feel more conceptual than emotionally immersive. Together, these two films reflect different approaches to similar realities. Panahi builds tension through precision, structure, and moral conflict. Aisha Can’t Fly Away operates through mood, metaphor, and slow transformation.
Both engage with systems of pressure.
Both question what remains of the individual within them.
But where one confronts the question directly, the other circles around it.
A similarly urgent and deeply personal work is Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk by Sepideh Farsi which also premiered at Cannes and later was presented at the Golden Apricot. The film is constructed around a series of video exchanges between the director and Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, recorded from Gaza, conversations unfolding in real time, shaped by unstable connections, interruptions, and the constant presence of danger.
What makes the film particularly striking is the tragic rupture at its core: Hassouna was killed just weeks in fact, days after the film was selected for Cannes. Farsi later admitted that “each of our conversations could be the last one,” describing the fragile connection between them as something “almost miraculous” in its persistence. The project itself emerged out of urgency rather than design. As Farsi explains, she did not approach the film through a traditional production process: she “filmed immediately,” guided by instinct, choosing even to work with a phone in order to preserve the rawness and immediacy of the exchange. Her intention was not to create a polished image, but, as she puts it, “a human image, full of imperfections,” reflecting both distance and vulnerability.
At the same time, the film resists conventional documentary structure. Farsi has described it less as representation and more as an act of witnessing - an attempt to hold onto presence in the face of disappearance. The editing, she notes, was guided primarily by emotion rather than information, focusing on moments where “we were closest,” where Hassouna’s voice could fully emerge.
The result is a film that exists in a deeply unstable space, between communication and loss, image and absence. It is not about Gaza as a distant geopolitical reality, but about a single life unfolding and then abruptly interrupted.
Farsi is also well known to Armenian audiences. Just months earlier, she was in Yerevan as a jury member at the ReA International Animation Films and Comics Art Festival and where her film Siren had its regional premiere - reinforcing her ongoing connection with the local film community.
Join us on Telegram