Iranian dissident auteur and Cannes Palme d’Or 2025 winner Jafar Panahi (It Was Just an Accident) didn’t make it to the U.K. for a planned Friday Screen Talk event at the 69th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF).
“Regrettably, the in-person Jafar Panahi Screen Talk is canceled due to a scheduling conflict,” the festival said in a statement midday on Friday. “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.
The filmmaker was originally scheduled to fly from New York to London, THR understands. Panahi missed a series of U.S. events after his visa was delayed by the U.S. government shutdown, but landed Tuesday to appear at the Beyond Fest, followed by the New York Film Festival, which rescheduled for Friday a conversation featuring Panahi and Martin Scorsese.
Last month, France selected Panahi‘s drama It Was Just an Accident to represent the country at next year’s Oscars in the best international feature category. 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 put forward Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which secured an Oscar nomination.
It Was Just an Accident marks Panahi’s first film since being released from prison in Iran. It was partly inspired by his second incarceration there. Neon, which also released Panahi’s The Year of the Everlasting Storm, in May acquired the North American rights to Accident.
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 a 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.”