Jafar Panahi wins the Palme d'Or at a Cannes Film Festival with a very political list of winners

"I would like to ask all Iranians, in Iran and around the world: let's put all problems aside. The most important issue is the freedom of our country. And let no one dare tell us what to wear, what to say, what to do. In the same way, cinema is a society and no one has the right to tell us what to say and what to do." This sentence, spoken by the winner of the Palme d'Or, Iranian Jafar Panahi, for his film A Simple Accident , was undoubtedly the strongest and most heartfelt of the closing ceremony of the ^78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, on Saturday. Imprisoned several times in his country, banned from filming for twenty years, banned from leaving the country for fourteen years, this great filmmaker, disciple and heir of Abbas Kiarostami, is the author of an exceptional body of work, partly clandestine.

Her new film depicts the confrontation between former political prisoners who accidentally reunite with their tormentor, as well as the moral dilemma this situation creates. Even more than her previous films, this work is a frontal attack on the repression that has intensified in Iran since the birth of the "Women, Life, Freedom" movement in 2022.

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