France announced on Wednesday that it has chosen Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning drama It Was Just an Accident as its submission for the Academy Awards’ Best International Feature category. The selection, made public Sept. 17, 2025, keeps a difficult Oscar pathway open for a filmmaker who has spent years restricted by Iranian authorities and has rarely left the country in that period.
Panahi, who has spent much of the last 15 years under house arrest, travel bans or imprisonment, wrote, directed and edited It Was Just an Accident in Iran without government permission. Countries submit films for the international category, and in a move that has drawn criticism of the process, the Academy’s rules were tweaked in April to allow filmmakers who have refugee or asylum status to be represented by a country other than their own. It was Panahi’s first new film since his release from jail two years ago, following a hunger strike that drew widespread attention to his case. He edited the film in France, co-financed it with a French company, and for the first time in more than a decade traveled out of Iran to premiere the film in May at the Cannes Film Festival. There, It Was Just an Accident won the festival’s top prize and was subsequently acquired by Neon, which has mounted an awards campaign.
"Let us join forces," Panahi said when accepting the Palme d’Or. "No one should dare tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, what we should do or what we should not do. The cinema is a society. Nobody is entitled to tell what we should or refrain from doing."
It Was Just an Accident is described as a revenge drama in which a group of former prisoners think they have identified the man who could have tortured them in a previous detention. Because the suspects were blindfolded during their imprisonment, the group struggles to confirm the target’s identity. Panahi has said the film draws from his own experience of being imprisoned in Tehran and from the lives of others he met in confinement. "It was the experience of all these people I met in prison, mixed with my own perception and experience," he told Cannes reporters. "The fact of never seeing the face of your interrogator is everyone’s experience."
France’s selection came ahead of several other shortlisted titles, including Richard Linklater’s French-language ode to the New Wave Nouvelle Vague, Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life and the animated Arco. In recent years France has faced significant scrutiny for its Oscar choices; it passed over Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall in 2023, despite the film being a best-picture nominee, and skipped Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire in 2019. France has not won the international Oscar since Indochine in 1993.
The 98th Academy Awards are scheduled for March 15, 2026, in Los Angeles, where It Was Just an Accident will be campaigned as France’s entry in the international feature category and as part of Panahi’s ongoing efforts to bring attention to his case and to Iranian cinema’s resilience under restrictions.