Panahi London Film Fest Talk Canceled “Due to Scheduling Conflict”
The Iranian dissident, who won the Cannes Palme d’Or 2025 for ‘It Was Just an Accident,’ will record the Screen Talk, to be available online for free.
“Regrettably, the in-person Panahi Screen Talk is canceled due to scheduling conflict,” the festival said. “The Screen Talk will now be recorded and made available online for free, exclusively first on BFI Player, and then on BFI YouTube.” The timing of the digital release wasn’t immediately clear.
It Was Just an Accident marks Panahi’s first film since being released from prison in Iran, partly inspired by his second incarceration there.
Neon, which also released Panahi’s The Year of the Everlasting Storm, acquired the North American rights after Canes Fest.
In 2009, after Panahi attended the funeral of a student killed in the so-called Green Revolution protests, the government banned him from leaving the country. In 2010, citing his plans to shoot a film with the protests as backdrop, the government slapped him with a 20-year ban on travel and filmmaking, along with a six-year suspended prison sentence for “propaganda against the system.”
My Oscar Book:
This is the second year running that a European country has nominated a film from an Iranian dissident director for the Academy Awards.
Last year, Germany who put forward Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which secured an Oscar nomination.
