![Jafar Panahi Returns to Marrakech: “I’m a Filmmaker. I Can’t Do Anything Else But Make Films” [Marrakech]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/05135443/Conversation-Jafar-Panahi-12_04_%C2%A9Z.latouri_FIFM2025-3085.jpg "Jafar Panahi Returns to Marrakech: “I’m a Filmmaker. I Can’t Do Anything Else But Make Films” [Marrakech]")
MARRAKECH – Oscar-winning Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi sat before an eager audience at the 22nd Marrakech International Film Festival’s “In Conversation” session, a man who embodies cinematic defiance. Just days before, Iranian authorities sentenced him in absentia to one year in prison, along with a two-year travel ban, on charges of “propaganda activities” against the state. Despite imprisonment and nearly 15 years of bans from working, traveling, and giving interviews, the Iranian master filmmaker remains unfailingly resolute in his determination to make films—and to return home. “I’m a filmmaker. I can’t do anything else but make films,” he says simply.
Panahi’s latest film, “It Was Just an Accident,” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May 2025, adding to a collection of accolades that includes the Golden Lion for “The Circle” (2000), the Golden Bear for “Taxi Tehran” (2015), and the Camera d’Or at Cannes for “The White Balloon” (1995). He just returned from New York with three Gotham Awards for “It Was Just an Accident”: Best International Film, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.
Many of his awards were once displayed at the Museum of Cinema in Iran, but that changed after his imprisonment. “After I went to jail, then I decided that it isn’t my sense to give my awards to this museum and I asked my wife to go and see them and take them back,” Panahi explained. The awards now sit in his apartment alongside his collection of vintage cameras. “In fact, I still have more cameras than awards,” he added with characteristic humor.
That humor has sustained Panahi through extraordinary circumstances, and it continues to infuse his work. “It Was Just an Accident” marks a new era in his cinema. Unlike his previous films, where he played versions of himself, this tells the story of people who share traumatic experiences from their time in prison, centered around a kidnapped man and an escalating conflict over his fate.
“I’m a social filmmaker, meaning that I get the inspiration for my films from my surroundings,” Panahi explained. “So of course, changing my environment necessarily has an impact on my own life and then on the films that I make.”
He noted that while in prison, you don’t immediately think about your next project: “You just try to spend time and you just try to bear your own condition by sitting with the others and listening to the others, listening to their stories, people who, for some of them, have spent five or ten years there.” The film, he said, “is the result of my personal experience, but also of a collective experience.”
Sound plays a vital role in “It Was Just an Accident”—it is, in some ways, a film about noises and sounds. This focus emerged directly from Panahi’s prison experience. “One of the common experiences of political prisoners are interrogations,” he explained. “All of us have been through this blindfoldness, sitting in front of the wall, and then the only sense that you can develop is hearing because you have this man walking behind you, asking you questions, listening to you, trying to make you speak.”
During these interrogations, he recalled, “you just tend to listen and try and imagine that man, you wonder how old he is, you wonder what he looks like.” This sensory experience became the film’s foundation: “It was obvious that if I wanted to depict these people and their way of being and relating to the world, I would have to put everything on the sound.”
The film has a different rhythm than his recent work—faster cuts, ellipses, a different energy. Panahi attributes this to stepping out from in front of the camera: “In previous films, I was in as myself or embodying a version of myself. And in that case, due to my condition, there was some stillness, something quite slow and steady in the rhythm, whereas here I was behind the camera, the story was different, so it also needed a different rhythm.”
Despite its serious subject matter, “It Was Just an Accident” retains moments of humor—a signature element of Panahi’s work. “No matter how serious what we go through is, there is always some laughter or some humor in it,” he observed. “And so this is the balance of our existence, and you cannot get rid of it when we make films.”
The film features a young girl—the daughter of the kidnapped man—who asks insightful questions throughout. She connects to the bold young female protagonists who have appeared throughout Panahi’s career, from “The White Balloon” and “The Mirror” to “The Circle.” “There is something common, definitely, between this little girl or the little girl of the white balloon or the mirror, it’s their boldness, the fact that they don’t accept what they are told and they claim more and more,” Panahi said.
That determination mirrors the spirit of Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement that erupted after Mahsa Amini’s death in 2022. Though Panahi was in jail during the protests, he remembers what surprised prison officials most: “The age of the people who would demonstrate. They were extremely young. I was in jail, but I remember that that’s what surprised them most, the head of the jail, Who are these kids?” He sees hope in this youth movement: “There are also babies who are to be born, women who will give birth, and this is the ray of hope that I perceive in Iran.”
Panahi’s return to Marrakech was particularly poignant. “I think it’s 20 years ago or something like that,” he recalled of his first visit, when he drove from Paris through Spain and took a boat to Morocco. “It was really a fascinating experience because it’s not the kind of trip that you have where you just go to festivals—it was really driving through the countryside through the cities and really getting to meet with the people.”
After nearly 15 years of travel bans, being able to present his film at festivals again has been meaningful. “I have been able to sit with different audiences throughout the world and watch my film with them,” he reflected. “Because for me, it’s really part of the task of a filmmaker to see the film, how people see, how people react to it.”
That observational approach—what Panahi calls being a “social filmmaker”—has defined his career. “A social filmmaker means that you find your inspiration material in the society in which you live,” he explained. “ It’s about seeing what are the restrictions, tensions that people have to deal with. And who receives more restrictions than anyone in Iranian society? Women.”
Technology has aided his guerrilla filmmaking approach. When authorities controlled film laboratories, editing rooms, and equipment, he turned to digital. For “Taxi Tehran,” he used three hidden cameras—“one was in a tissue box, one was on the dashboard, and one was behind”—allowing him to film freely despite his filmmaking ban. “The three of them were completely hidden, and so we could go everywhere in the streets and film with them.”
This ability to work within restrictions while subverting official narratives defines Panahi’s cinema. His films refuse to present Iran “in a way that suits the official narrative” and instead seek “the truth, the reality, a reflection of life as it truly is.”
Hours after the December 1 prison sentence was announced, Panahi stood on stage at New York’s Gotham Awards accepting three prizes. In his acceptance speech for Best Screenplay, he dedicated the honor “to independent filmmakers in Iran and around the world, filmmakers who keep the camera rolling in silence, without support, and at times by risking everything they have, only with their faith in truth and humanity.”
Days later, speaking at his Marrakech “In Conversation” session, Panahi addressed the sentence directly: “I have only one passport. This is the passport of my country, and I wish to keep it.”
Despite international acclaim and the opportunity to remain abroad, Panahi’s commitment to Iran is unwavering. “Although I was given the opportunity, even in the hardest years, I never considered leaving my country and being a refugee elsewhere,” he said. “I’ve been working night and day on this Oscar campaign for over three months now. This sentence happened in the middle of this process, but I will finish this campaign and go back to Iran as soon as possible after.”
He added: “One’s country is the best place to live, no matter what problems, what difficulties. My country is where I can breathe, where I can find the reason to live and where I can find the strength to create.”
As he sat in Marrakech, temporarily free to travel and present his work, the contradiction was stark: here was an internationally celebrated filmmaker who just won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and swept the Gotham Awards, who faces imprisonment upon his return home for doing exactly what he does so brilliantly—bearing witness to Iranian life with compassion, humor, and unflinching honesty. Yet Panahi insists on returning. For now, and for as long as he can, Jafar Panahi continues making films because, as he says, he can do nothing else. His determination to keep observing, recording, creating—and returning—stands as its own form of resistance, a testament to cinema’s power and one filmmaker’s unbreakable spirit.
