Cannes 2025: dissident director Jafar Panahi receives the golden palm for “a simple accident”

Iranian filmmaker and dissident Jafar Panahi received the palm d’Or in Cannes this Saturday, May 24 for his film A simple accidentsurprised. During his speech, the 64 -year -old director asked for the “freedom” of his country.

Jafar Panahi, who could go to Cannes for the first time in 15 years, was rewarded for this moral history that ausses the temptation of former prisoners to take revenge on their torturers.

“I think it is time to ask all people, all Iranians, with all the different opinions of others, worldwide, in Iran or in the world, they allow me to ask for one thing: let’s put aside (…) all problems, all differences, the most important at this time, it is our country and it is the freedom of our country,” he said in Farsi, according to the translation provided by the festival.

“Transform darkness into forgiveness”

No one knows what spell he will reserve to the Tehran authorities after this eleventh feature film, which has already been imprisoned twice in Iran, where he was sentenced in 2010 to six years in prison and 20 years of prohibition of filming.

“What matters most is that the movie was made. I didn’t take the time to think about what could happen. I’m alive while making movies,” he told AFP on Tuesday, May 20.

When giving him the golden palm, the president of the jury Juliette Binoche spoke of the vocation of artists to “transform the darkness into forgiveness.”

“Art causes, questions, discomfort. (…) Art mobilizes the creative energy of the most precious, the most animated, in us. A force that allows it to transform the darkness into forgiveness, with hope, into a new life,” said the French star.

Since 2010, Iranian had not been able to leave his country to go to one of the main film festivals that covered him with distinctions (two gold in Berlin, three awards in Cannes, another in Venice).

Jafar Panahi is also the fourth director of the history of the seventh art, after Henri -georges Clouzot, Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Altman, have won the supreme reward of the three most prestigious film festivals.