Iranian director Jafar Panahi has added another major prize to his comeback: his thriller It Was Just an Accident has won Best Film and Best Director at the 18th Asia Pacific Screen Awards, held at The Langham on Australia’s Gold Coast on 27 November. The Cannes Palme d’Or winner, a France–Iran–Luxembourg co-production, moves deeper into the international awards race after being named France’s candidate for the international feature Oscar.
APSA’s jury describes the film as a slow-burn drama that begins with a minor incident and spirals into life-changing consequences, in keeping with Panahi’s habit of turning intimate moral choices into charged political material.
Chair Tracey Vieira said the winners represent “extraordinary cinematic voices from across 22 countries and areas of the Asia Pacific,” pointing to a surge in emerging filmmakers and a wide spread of perspectives at this year’s ceremony. Motion Picture Association executive Urmila Venugopalan noted that more than 70 nations now feed into the APSA ecosystem, casting the event as a major hub for Asia-Pacific cinema.
Set around former Iranian political prisoners who confront a man they believe to be their past torturer, It Was Just an Accident was shot in Iran without an official permit, with cast and crew working under strict secrecy. Editor Amir Etminan has described cutting the film on a modest laptop in a makeshift apartment, using decoy scripts and smuggled drives to keep authorities from discovering the project.
Panahi previously spent months in prison and lived under a lengthy filmmaking and travel ban after Iranian courts targeted his work, yet he continued to shoot features clandestinely before his release in 2023. In recent conversations he has framed It Was Just an Accident as a story about forgiveness rather than revenge, saying he resists simple “political movie” labels even as the film directly faces state violence and the ethics of retribution.
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APSA’s wider honours this year echo that mix of artistic ambition and political urgency: Akio Fujimoto’s Lost Land, about Rohingya siblings separated from their family, received the Jury Grand Prize; Singaporean director Tan Siyou’s Amoeba took Best Youth Film for its portrait of adolescence under intense academic pressure; and Sepideh Farsi’s Gaza-set Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk won Best Documentary Film.
Awards for Korean animation The Square, Hong Kong actor Sean Lau and Kyrgyz filmmaker Aktan Arym Kubat round out a slate that backs filmmakers confronting censorship, displacement and war while keeping regional stories firmly in view.
