Chapter 2: Between the Phoenix and the Raven
It Was Just an Accident, directed by Jafar Panahi, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025. If you are planning to watch the film, I would suggest stopping here, as what follows will inevitably reveal parts of the story.
The film’s dark comedy brings together people from very different lives; individuals who share one experience: each of them has been tortured by the same man at different moments in time, for political reasons, while in prison. Sharing the same trauma is what connects them to each other. At the beginning of the story, they suddenly unite, facing the man who once held power over them, now held captive himself.
From the second half of the film onward, there is no mystery left to solve. The question is no longer what happened, but what should be done. What would these people do with the man who tortured them? It is a question that has followed modern humanity for decades:
Who wins? good or evil?As the story unfolds, the characters gradually separate into two groups. One believes in revenge. The other resists it, insisting on responsibility, restraint, and something resembling moral order. There is no easy answer for such a dilemma.
One way to read the film is to see the torturer as a clear symbol of the regime; one that does not tolerate dissent and crushes any voice raised against it. In this interpretation, the film asks a painful question: If one side plays without rules, is there any real chance for the other side to win? If this is how one understands the story, the imbalance of power feels undeniable. History and nature itself, has rarely been fair. In almost all cases, the weaker side is condemned to lose. Unless one still believes in acts of courage, in people choosing dignity over savagery. This is a hopeful vision. It is one I no longer fully believe in. The violence of the regime has proven itself far more brutal than imagination allows, leaving little room for even the smallest act aligned with humanity.
There is, however, another way to see the film. What if the regime is not something abstract or distant, but something created; slowly and quietly, by ordinary people? What if the torturer is not a monster born outside society, but someone painfully familiar? What if for the past decades we have been observing “The Tale of Birds” not searching for the phoenix this time, but dreaming to find the raven. There is a brief line near the end of the film that lingers with me. As he breaks down, he says that in the beginning it was difficult, but over time he grew used to it, using torture as a way to release his anger.
This possibility unsettles me more than the first. What if what we fear is only dark because we have always seen it as a single, unified force? What if, once examined closely, it breaks apart into something far less powerful, into individuals, scared of what they had done. This is the idea I choose to hold on to. It allows me to keep moving forward, believing that one day the great black raven we have feared for so long will be reduced to fragments so small they are no longer recognisable, let alone terrifying. And that those fragments, finally, might resemble human beings again, carrying the very qualities that were once denied. This is the future I find more possible. And the one I quietly wish for, every day for my people and my land.
