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Jafar Panahi’s Cannes Triumph Sends a Warning to Authoritarians Everywhere

The Iranian director’s Palme d’Or-winning thriller, “It Was Just an Accident,” set the tone for a festival defined by dramas of political resistance.

Moving vehicles have framed the drama of many an Iranian art-house classic since Abbas Kiarostami’s “ Taste of Cherry ”—incidentally, the last film from that country to win the Palme, in 1997—but few of them have shifted into such high dramatic gear, or careened so determinedly between thriller and farce. Binoche spoke out again at this year’s opening ceremony, where she delivered a sombre tribute to Fatma Hassona, a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian photojournalist who was killed, along with ten members of her family, by an Israeli air strike in Gaza on April 16th. “My Father’s Shadow” is, in part, about the intoxication of surfaces: Davies immerses us and his child protagonists in the dazzling hustle and bustle of Lagos, and he frames Folarin as a presence both overwhelming and elusive—a citadel of masculinity whom the boys, though in awe of his magnetism, can already feel slipping away.

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