CINEMA OF RESISTANCE WINS AT CANNES

Jafar Panahi scoops the Palme d'Or while stories of women dominate the festival

- STORY: KONG RITHDEE

In a year full of richly textured stories about female trauma and painful personal growth, the Cannes jury, led by Juliette Binoche, took the noble route and gave the Palme d’Or to the most political film in the 22-title competition.

Jafar Panahi let out a roar of delight after his film It Was Just An Accident won the 78th Festival de Cannes’ most prestigious award last Saturday, becoming the second Iranian filmmaker to win Cannes’ top prize, after Abbas Kiarostami, and the fourth director in history to have won the biggest awards from all three major European film festivals (Berlin, Venice and Cannes).

Panahi competed at Cannes before, but his troubled relationship with the Iranian regime meant he was rarely present at the screenings of his own works.

In 2011, his ironically titled This Is Not A Film premiered at Cannes while Panahi was under house arrest (the popular story often told on the streets of Cannes is that the film was smuggled in a thumb drive hidden inside a cake — the veracity of which is never confirmed). In 2018, Three Faces competed and won Best Screenplay — the film was made clandestinely since Panahi was serving a 20-year filmmaking ban.

He was detained in 2022 after taking part in a mass protest against the government, then released after staging a hunger strike. Legally, he's free to make movies again — and yet he filmed It Was A Simple Accident underground because he refused to seek permission from the censors.

An enduring figure of courage and defiance in world cinema, Panahi, despite his relative freedom, doesn’t take his foot off the provocative pedal and has made another film that is unlikely to make him a favourite with the Iranian authorities.