Justin Chang

He'd also been banned from making movies, though he got around that restriction with great ingenuity and continued to shoot films in secret.

But then in 2022, Panahi was arrested again and imprisoned.

When he announced seven months later that he was beginning a hunger strike, many of us feared it would end with his death.

Instead, he was released after two days and has been free to travel ever since.

It's an astonishing real-life story, one that for tension and peril may well rival the one that Panahi tells in his new film, It Was Just an Accident.

This remarkable movie, which ended up winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, feels like a liberated work in every sense.

In his recent, more under-the-radar films, like Three Faces or No Bears, Panahi sometimes seemed to be speaking in code, or through layers of parable.

But there's nothing cryptic or ruminative about It Was Just an Accident.

It's a blast of pure anti-authoritarian rage, a gripping and often shockingly funny revenge thriller that, as Panahi has said in interviews, was informed by the stories of people he met in prison.

It begins on a dark night when an auto mechanic named Vahid, played by Vahid Mobasseri, hears something in his shop that catches his attention.

It's the sound of a customer's prosthetic leg, clomping slowly along, and it clearly triggers painful memories.

Some time ago, Vahid was one of several people arrested while protesting for workers' rights.

In prison, they were brutally tortured by a man they came to know as Pegleg, because of his prosthetic.

Now Vahid could swear that the customer in his garage, whose name is Egbal, is Pegleg himself.

But since Vahid was blindfolded during his torture, he can't trust his eyes, only his ears.

What Vahid does next is shocking.

The following day, after tailing Egbal for a while in his van, Vahid knocks the man out with a shovel, ties him up, transports him to a remote area, and tries to bury him alive.

But Egbal regains consciousness and begs Vahid to stop, claiming that he isn't the culprit and has no idea what Vahid is talking about.

Vahid puts Egbal back in his van and drives off to find others who can verify the man's identity.

One of his fellow former prisoners is a photographer named Shiva, played by Maryam Afshari, who, when he finds her, is in the middle of taking a couple's pre-wedding photos.