NEW YORK (AP) — France introduced Wednesday that it has chosen the Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning drama “It Was Just an Accident” as its submission to the Academy Awards.
The choice offers an Oscar pathway to a movie that Iran was sure to not choose itself. Panahi, who has spent a lot of the final 15 years both beneath home arrest, banned from journey or incarcerated, made “It Was Simply an Accident,” like his earlier movies, in his native Iran with out authorities permission.
Solely nations could make submissions for the Academy Awards finest worldwide class, a course of that has drawn criticism for permitting authoritarian regimes to dictate which movies are eligible for one of the crucial contested Oscars. A yr in the past, Germany submitted “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” by Panahi’s pal and countryman, Mohammad Rasoulof. In April, the Academy of Movement Image Arts and Sciences tweaked its guidelines to permit filmmakers with refugee or asylum standing to be represented by a rustic not their very own.
“It Was Just an Accident” is Panahi’s first movie since he was launched from jail two years in the past, following a starvation strike. He edited the movie in France, co-financed it with a French firm and, for the primary time in additional than a decade, traveled out of Iran to premiere the movie in Could on the Cannes Movie Pageant. There, it gained the pageant’s high award and was acquired by Neon, which is planning an awards marketing campaign.
“Let us join forces,” Panahi stated when accepting the Palme d’Or. “No one should dare tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, what we should do or what we should not do. The cinema is a society. Nobody is entitled to tell what we should or refrain from doing.”
“It Was Just an Accident” is a revenge drama wherein a gaggle of former prisoners discover the person they assume might have been their torturer in jail. However as a result of they had been blindfolded whereas jailed, they battle to make sure. Panahi drew from his personal expertise imprisoned in Tehran.
“It was the experience of all these people I met in prison, mixed with my own perception and experience,” Panahi stated in an interview in Cannes. “The fact of never seeing the face of your interrogator is everyone’s experience.”
France chosen Panahi’s movie over a number of shortlisted movies together with Richard Linklater’s French-language ode to the New Wave, “Nouvelle Vague,” Rebecca Zlotowski’s “A Private Life” and the animated function “Arco.” In recent times, France has generally been slammed for its decisions. It handed over Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” in 2023, although it was nominated for finest image, and skipped Céline Sciamma’s acclaimed 2019 drama “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”
Regardless of having one of the crucial strong and revered movie industries, France hasn’t gained the worldwide Oscar since 1993 with “Indochine.”
The 98th Academy Awards can be introduced on March 15, 2026, in Los Angeles.
