Why do international film festivals prefer to view Iran through Jafar Panahi’s lens rather than Saeed Roustaee’s? The choice between these two cinematic visions is not merely aesthetic; it reveals deeper cultural, political, and ideological expectations placed on Iranian cinema by global institutions. Yet the consequences of this preference are often overlooked. Roustaee emerges from the bruised, exhausted margins of Iranian society, where poverty, humiliation, and unspoken trauma shape daily existence. His cinema speaks of women’s suffering not as metaphor or symbol but as lived reality. Panahi, though fighting for the same ideals of freedom, comes from a middle-class background and frames his narratives through a more symbolic, gestural relationship with the political landscape. Their lenses are not interchangeable—one grows from the soil, the other stands as critique.
Panahi’s new film, It Was Just an Accident, begins with documentary-like immediacy. Gradually, however, humor and irony enter the narrative, pushing it into spaces where realism collapses. The story’s stakes weaken until it seems that nothing significant has occurred at all—merely a group of well-meaning, naïve friends caught in a mess they barely understand. The imprisoned laborer, who serves as a turning point in both Roustaee’s and Panahi’s films, behaves at times with an impulsiveness and lack of awareness that defies psychological credibility. Characters who supposedly endured torture, political persecution, and desperate struggle suddenly behave like people with little experience, little caution, and even less clarity.
A man suspected—without certainty—of being an intelligence-service torturer is kidnapped. Former prisoners who claim to have left activism behind find themselves ready to commit murder within minutes. Their panic, their shouting, their contradictions all suggest a group emotionally shattered yet strangely untouched by trauma. After a year of supposed torment, they return to life without depression, without hesitation, without any clear ideology. They even help the torturer’s family, generously using their own bank cards to cover the man’s expenses. Their lack of strategic thinking is so extreme that police track them down in a single day. How could such disoriented people have once fought for the future of a nation? How could they have endured torture yet emerge psychologically weightless? One wonders how characters so confused could ever commit the grave act of burying a man alive.
The final scenes, filled with sweeping slogans and symbolic flourishes in a picturesque desert, generate neither empathy nor sorrow. Whatever emotional force the film carries dissolves quickly. The viewer leaves with a lingering question: what, in the end, was the film trying to say?
Roustaee’s Woman and Child, by contrast, contains an emotional truth that does not evaporate. When I compare Mahnaz’s pain in Roustaee’s film with the suffering depicted in Panahi’s work, it becomes impossible to label Roustaee anti-feminist. On the contrary, he confronts the brutalities inflicted on Iranian women with striking sensitivity. Pirinaz Izadyar delivers a luminous, heartbreaking performance as a young mother of two. Her initial softness, her feminine coyness, her desire to preserve the fragile love that enters her life—all slowly fracture. She breaks, splinters, dissolves. Her face transforms with a depth that belies the fact she has never been a mother in real life. Roustaee’s direction—his assured choreography of close-ups, long shots, upward camera angles, his graceful reconstruction of parallel scenes at the beginning and end—creates an aesthetic resonance rarely achieved in contemporary Iranian cinema. The whirling toy that recalls Hitchcock’s Vertigo is no accident; it is a sign of an artist evolving toward richer psychological terrain.
Roustaee also makes the bold choice of portraying a middle-aged man devoid of ethics and loyalty, whose financial corruption strips any believable romance from the sisters who compete for him. The issue here is not the script but the casting. Peyman Maadi, a talented actor though he is, lacks the youthful charisma needed to make the rivalry between the sisters believable. Yet this flaw inadvertently amplifies the film’s feminist dimension: audiences often choose the version of reality they prefer to see, not the version that dominates their society. Meanwhile, the man’s unraveling after his child’s death—his antisocial impulses, his erratic behavior at school and in the community—could easily warrant an article of its own.
When viewed through the lens of revenge, the contrast between the two films becomes even sharper. In Panahi’s narrative, a newly freed prisoner, tortured for a year, is ready to kill a man she only thinks was her torturer. In Roustaee’s story, a grieving mother—fragile, furious, denied her basic rights under patriarchal laws that the film exposes with precision—cannot kill a dying father without being haunted by guilt. Psychologically, the distinction is profound: Panahi’s characters move toward violence with unsettling ease; Roustaee’s struggle with moral consequence. The capacity for forgiveness in Woman and Child—from the bride to the photographer’s daughter—reveals a feminine resilience and emotional refinement absent from Panahi’s film.
Despite the relatively privileged backgrounds of Panahi’s female characters, Izadyar’s performance communicates a humanity far more tender and compelling. Her emotional truth lingers; it does not evaporate.
We must learn to understand our country through our own cinematic language. Behind every camera and every critic, countless unspoken truths shape the image of Iran that reaches the world. Panahi is a courageous, respected figure, a filmmaker who learned under Abbas Kiarostami, but technically he has not advanced in meaningful ways in recent years. Meanwhile, Roustaee’s artistry grows bolder, more precise, more emotionally resonant.
Even the titles speak volumes. In Panahi’s film, nothing is “just an accident” except the coming together of a group of naïve friends. Roustaee’s Woman and Child carries deeper meanings about womanhood intertwined with motherhood. The idea of the “mother” is often hidden inside the word “woman,” yet femininity finds its most powerful expression through motherhood itself.
