Jafar Panahi Awarded The Palme D’Or At Cannes For His Feature, ‘It Was Just An Accident’

Iranian director Jafar Panahi took home the Cannes’ Palme d’Or for the Best Film category for It Was Just an Accident at the 78th film festival; the director received his award from Juliette Binoche, the jury president.

This is Panahi’s first film since being released from a Tehran prison in 2023 and is a direct attack on the Iranian totalitarian government. The feature, categorized as a thriller, “follows a former political prisoner who kidnaps a man he believes to be his torturer and then debates with other dissidents whether to kill or forgive him.”

With this award, Panahi has become the fourth director to complete the festival triple crown, being awarded the top accolade at the three prominent European film festivals. In 2000, Panahi won the Golden Lion in Venice for his feature The Circle. In 2015, he was awarded the Golden Bear in Berlin for Taxi. Panahi joins Henri-Georges Clouzot, Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Altman in this rare circle. This win is also a milestone for Neon, as this is the sixth consecutive time a film distributed by Neon for the North American region has won the Palme d’Or.

The 2025 jury of Cannes included American actors Halle Berry, Jeremy Strong, and Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher; directors Dieudo Hamadi from the Republic of Congo, Payal Kapadia from India, Hong Sang-soo from South Korea, and Carlos Reygadas from Mexico; the jury was rounded out by French-Moroccan writer and journalist Leila Slimani.

The festival almost had its own theatrical ending on Saturday when that morning “a regional power outage shut down the electrical grid serving Cannes and much of the surrounding region” and was reportedly due to “deliberate sabotage on the electrical infrastructure.” Even though the outage disturbed a few early morning screenings, the festival at large remained unaffected with the help of the emergency power source.

As for the other awards, Hasan Hadi was the first Iraqi director to win the Camera d’Or for Best First Film, winning for The President’s Cake. John C. Reilly presented the Best Screenplay award to two-time Palme d’Or recipients Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for the French drama Young Mothers. Brazilian actor Wagner Moura was awarded Best Actor for his lead role in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, a 1970s political spy thriller. Filho also brought home Best Director for this feature in an infrequent double award. Nadia Melliti won the Best Actress award for her performance in Hafsia Herzi’s coming-of-age drama, The Little Sister. The Jury Prize this year was a tie between German director Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, “an epic family drama set across four generations in the same rural farmhouse,” and Spanish director Oliver Laxe’s Sirat, a techno-immersed drama set in the Moroccan desert.