It was just an accident

This film, in Persian with English subtitles, won the Palme d'Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and is undoubtedly a very powerful indictment of the fascist Islamist regime in Iran. It was shot secretly, at great personal risk to all those involved, on the streets of Tehran.

The format is at first somewhat confusing, but it gradually begins to grip those watching, as the true nature of the dictatorship of the Ayatollahs becomes clear, not by anyone, as in documentaries, directly addressing the audience, but by the interplay between the main characters, as their memories come to the fore.

I do not wish to explain too much of the plot, as the way in which the message becomes increasingly straightforward is brilliant, and those watching must be allowed to enjoy the process for themselves.

It contains a great deal of black humour, and the eccentric behaviour of some of the principals is pronounced, yet no one can avoid an understanding of what it meant, and means, to be an ordinary person oppressed by a truly evil totalitarian system. The magnificent ambiguity of the final scene is a truly intense, and splendid culmination of a great film.

The film leads one to several conclusions

Firstly that the Islamist government is profoundly immoral and wicked, having persecuted all those who dare to ask for freedom, leading to the slaughter of thousands of innocents in just the past few weeks.

Secondly, both the fact that it exists at all, and the current threat it poses to all decent people, both in Iran and abroad, can be laid at the door of the Western liberals who were so happy to chant 'Down with the Shah' in 1979. His government was oppressive, and needed reform, but it was replaced with a theocratic nightmare straight out of the Middle Ages.

The modern heirs of those useful idiots now can be seen marching and chanting against Israel, our democratic ally, and a victim of Islamist terror, while ignoring the actions of the Iranian government, as it massacres it own people, and tries to spread its foul doctrines throughout the Middle East, motivated by a totally irrational hatred for Jewish people. As is true of all totalitarians they care nothing for the individual human being, but only for the state, the absolute opposite of democratic nations, with a Judaeo-Christian heritage, however much we have at times failed to live up to that ideal.

Perhaps the most depressing thing of all is that, if in order to ensure our own survival, the West will eventually be obliged to use overwhelming force to end the threat from Iran, which will mean that so many of those decent people represented by the heroes of this film, will share in the fate of the Ayatollahs. Despite this depressing fact I recommend this picture to anyone who wants to know the truth about what is going on in that benighted country.