Iranian dissident director Jafar Panahi has won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes film festival for his movie "It Was Just an Accident." It tells the story of a group of former Iranian prisoners who abduct a guard allegedly responsible for torturing them in jail.
00:00And crossing over to Cannes Live, where Scott Roxburgh has the very latest.
00:04What more can you tell us about the Palme d'Or winner?
00:09Yes, I mean, for people who don't know, Yafar Pana, he is probably the most famous and important distant director in the world,
00:18and also one of the most acclaimed international auteurs in his own right.
00:23He has been banned from making films for some 20 years by the Iranian regime.
00:30Just recently, they lifted that ban, and this film is the first one that he's made since that ban was lifted.
00:36And the first time he's been in Cannes for over 20 years, actually.
00:40So it was incredible to see him on the stage tonight accepting his golden palm.
00:47This film, It Was Just an Accident, is kind of phenomenal, because I think it is his most political work.
00:52It's, as you said, a revenge thriller.
00:54It's about a former political prisoner who thinks he recognizes his torture on the streets of Tehran.
00:59So he kidnaps him and then gathers up other political prisoners to decide what to do with him.
01:04What starts off as sort of a revenge thriller becomes more of a discussion about the purposes of vengeance and the possibility of forgiveness.
01:11Incredibly powerful movie and incredibly moving to see Yafar Pana accept the golden palm this evening.
01:17Wow, so geopolitics really taking center stage, and Donald Trump's erratic policies of late, also a topic, I believe.
01:27Yes, that was definitely a topic at the beginning of the festival, where Donald Trump announced a week before Cannes that he wanted to impose 100% tariff on all films made outside the United States.
01:35No one really understood what he meant or how that would actually work, but it did sort of disrupt everything here for at least the first couple of days.
01:42But then, because nothing seemed to follow up on Trump's pledge, people sort of forgot about it and got back to the business of watching movies and buying and selling movies, which happened quite a bit here at the festival.
01:54It sounds like investors on stock markets.
01:56So, what else stood out to you in this year's competition, Scott?
02:03Well, as you said, it was a very political festival, which is unusual for Cannes, which tends to like to focus on films for film's sake.
02:10But besides the Panahi, which is very political, as I mentioned, there was a film, The Secret Agent, a Brazilian movie, which won two prizes tonight, including for Best Director and Best Actor.
02:21And it is set in the 1970s, but it really uses that period, the political disruption of that period, to comment on a current situation, both in Brazil and around the world.
02:31And then one of my, perhaps, personal favourites, which won the prize of the jury, was Sirat, from a new Spanish director, Oliver Lax, which is sort of a post-apocalyptic film set among the independent rave culture of central Morocco.
02:49Very odd to describe it that way, but it really is a look at the environmental disaster that is coming upon us.
02:56So, very, very political in that sense. And despite its quite abysmal approach, and sometimes a very strong and rough approach, it offers a glimpse of hope, which was the common theme among all the political films in Cannes this year.
03:10Nice way to wrap it up. Scott Roxburgh at the Cannes Film Festival. Thank you very much for your reporting.
