Iranian dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi won the palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday for his revenge thriller “was just an accident”, delivering the main prize of the festival to a director who had been forbidden to leave Iran for more than 15 years.
Cate Blanchett presented the prize to Panahi, who three years ago was imprisoned in Iran before going to a hunger strike. For a decade and a half, he has made films clandestinely in his native country, including a film (“This is not a movie”) made in his living room, and another (“taxi”) set in a car.
The crowd rose in a thunderous ovation for the filmmaker, who immediately lifted his arms and lay in his seat with disbelief before applauding his collaborators and the audience around him. On stage, Panahi was encouraged by the president of the Jury of Cannes, Juliette Binoche, who in 2010 at the Festival held the name of Panahi to honor the director and then under house arrest.
On stage, Panahi said that what mattered most was freedom in his country.
“We join forces,” Panahi said. “No one should be attributed to telling us what kind of clothing we should wear, what we should do or what we should not do. Cinema is a society. No one has the right to say what we should or refrain from doing.”
“Let’s keep waiting,” he concluded.
The victory for “ITS Just an accident” extends one of the most unprecedented gusts in the films: the neon independent distributor has backed the last six winners of Palma d’Or. Neon, who acquired “was just an accident” for the distribution of North America after its premiere in Cannes, follows its palms for “parasite”, “titan”, “triangle of sadness”, “anatomy of a fall” and “Anora”.
All those films were contending to Oscar and two, “Parasite” and “Anora”, won the best image.
Last year, filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulf fled from Iran to attend the premiere of his film in Cannes and resettle in Germany. However, Panahi has said that life in exile is not for him. He planned to fly to his home in Tehran on Sunday.
“It was just an accident,” he was inspired by Panahi’s experience in jail. In him, a group of former prisoners meets the man who terrified them in jail and weighs whether to kill him or not.
“The film arises from a feeling of resistance, survival, which is absolutely necessary today,” Binoche told journalists after the ceremony. “Art will always win. What is human will always win.”
Cannes’s closing ceremony followed a great power cut that hit southeast France on Saturday in what the police suspected that it was a fire caused. Only a few hours before the stars began to transmit the red carpet, the energy was restored in Cannes.
Other winners at the Cannes 2025 Film Festival
The Grand Prix, or Second Prize, was awarded to the Norwegian family drama of Joachim Trier “sentimental value”, his praised follow -up of “the worst person in the world.” Some expected that “sentimental value” would win the palm, but Trier, whose film brings him together with actor Renate Reinsve, still received an important prize.
“We live in a moment of tremendous excess and saturation of images. They are throwing moving images all the time,” Trier said. “And I want to pay tribute to the Cannes Film Festival for being a place where the great cinematographic image, which is the basis of the mobile image, the free image, the image that we take the time to see, the image where we can identify between us in contemplation and empathy, be appreciated from this place in such a way is very important at this time.”
The Brazilian political thriller of Kleber Mendonça Filho “The Secret Agent” won two great awards: the best director of Filho and the best Wagner Moura actor. Although Cannes’s jurors are generally urged to spread prizes, the two for “the secret agent” showed the strong feelings of the jury for it. When asked about the two awards, Jeremy Strong jury simply explained “that was our desire.”
The victories, who followed Oscar’s international victory for “I’M Still Still here” by Walter Salles in March, gave Brazil more to celebrate. In X, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the awards “show that our country’s cinema is insurmountable.”
The jury award was divided between two films: the road trip of the Óliver Laxe “Sirât” desert and the German drama of the Mascha Schilinski “Sound of Falling” generation. The best actress went to Nadia Melliti for “The Little Sister”, the French drama of the age of Hafsia Herzi.
The Belgian brothers Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardennes, who are twice winners of Palme d’Or, won the best script of their last drama, “Young Mothers”. The Cannes Award for the best first film was for Hasan Hadi, for “The President’s Cake”, making it the first Iraqi movie to win an award at the Festival.
What more shaped Cannes this year?
Saturday’s ceremony takes to an end a Cannes 78 Film Festival where Geopolitics issued a long shadow, both on the screen and outside. Shortly before the French extravagance of Riviera, which is also the largest film market in the world, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, raised the idea of a 100% tariff on films made abroad.
Most filmmakers responded with a shoulder shrink, calling the illogical plan. “Can you hold the film in customs?
That was one of the best American films in Cannes, along with the “highest 2 highest” by Spike Lee, Christopher Mcquarrie-Tom’s cruise actioner “Mission: Impossible-Final Chemoning” and the “Edington” of Ari Aster.
