Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi pays tribute to his people with this drama about the pain of those retaliated by the cruelty of his country's regime.

By Sergi SánchezFor Frames

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The allusion to Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' is not accidental, because the last Palme d'Or in Cannes It has something of that theater of the absurd in which paralysis threatens to block any emotional reaction. And here the affections are important: What moves is the pain of those retaliated by the cruelty of the Iranian regime, that which tortures dissidents – if we understand dissidence as the exercise of freedom of expression – and the important thing is to conclude whether that pain will silence their cries with revenge.

'A simple accident' tells a simple story, which could be titled 'Five victims and one executioner'. It begins with a vaguely disturbing prologue, the collision of a dog in the middle of the night, the announcement of a chance encounter that then gives way to a kind of road movie encapsulated in a moral dilemma that strains her like a thrillerand which, at times, flirts with surrealist satire, confined in a van in which the fate of an entire society is settled, of a revolution that places itself between the sword of settling accounts with the past and the wall of turning the page and looking to the future.

The fixed shot of a blindfolded face is enough to explain the complex chromatic range of hatred, resentment and thirst for justice of an entire people, to whom sewer pays tribute by granting him the gift of piety. Another thing is that this mercy serves a purpose: the disturbing ending of the film, which makes macabre use of off-screen, does not tell us about the banality of evil but about its survival. This is a film made of perverse symmetries and outrageous rhymes: like the seventh circle of hell of Dantecloses on our consciences, burying us alive.

For lovers of political cinema with clear ideas.