Jafar Panahi (Miyaneh, 1960), the greatest Iranian director of his generation and heir to his mentor Abbas Kiarostami, has also become a symbol of resistance against the Islamic regime of Iran, which long ago banned him from making any films. Indomitable, he continued to practice his craft thanks to the loopholes he found. After his latest imprisonment – seven months for criticizing the arrests of filmmakers Mohamed Rasoulof and Mustafa al-Ahmad – which He was released the day after he went on a hunger strike., Panahi has directed (from hiding) his most accessible and direct film: A simple accident, which opens in theaters this Friday. The film won the Palme d'Or at the last Cannes Film Festival. It's a thriller moral about the revenge of former prisoners of the regime against their torturer. He spoke with ARA a few weeks ago at the San Sebastián Film Festival.

Active member of the Iranian Green Revolution, since 2009 Jafar Panahi has been the victim of various arrests, imprisonments and domestic confinement. by his country's government. However, he hasn't stopped filming, to the point of turning his films and the conditions under which he was forced to produce them, often confined to his home, into a reflection of these experiences of captivity and a form of artistic resistance against political oppression. A simple accident represents, at first glance, a return to a certain normality. The winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, which is sweeping the French box office, is a film shot under less restrictive circumstances and, in terms of narrative, is one of the Iranian director's most accessible works.

One of the curiosities of this edition of the Cannes Film Festival is the coincidence in the parallel section Un Certain Regard of the directorial debuts of two popular actresses, established stars of American cinema: Kristen Stewart, who dazzled a few days ago with the poetic and tormented biography of Lidia Yuknavitch The chronology of water; and Scarlett Johansson, who presented this Tuesday Eleanor the Great, a dramatic comedy about a widow with a lot of drive and character who, after the death of her best friend, with whom she shared an apartment in Florida, returns to her native New York at over 90 years old to live with a recently divorced daughter and a grandson glued to his mobile phone screen.