corktown common
Thursday, July 23, 2026

it was just an accident

With the short film perfectly a strangeness

Jafar Panahi returns to the TOPS screen (following our 2024 screening of Taxi) with the Palme d’Or-winning and Oscar-nominated It Was Just an Accident, a taught psychological thriller and a scathing rebuke of Iranian authoritarianism. After Vahid (played by Vahid Mobasseri), a car mechanic and former political prisoner, encounters a man he suspects to be his former torturer at his garage, he kidnaps him in his van and leaves him in the desert. Racked with doubts, Vahid travels in his van back and forth between the desert and the city, bringing a group of former fellow prisoners – including a bride, her groom, their photographer, among others –  to the desert to help verify the man’s identity. Like all of his films since his 2010 ban by the Iranian government on filmmaking, It Was Just an Accident was filmed in secret without permits. Masterful in Panahi’s use of tone – would you believe that this film is often oddly quite funny? –  It Was Just an Accident will stick with you long after you leave the park.

In Canadian filmmaker Alison McAlpine’s recent Oscar-nominated short documentary film perfectly a strangeness, a band of donkeys travels the Chilean desert, and stumbles across an abandoned observatory. Delightfully enigmatic and visually sumptuous, with scenes of the night sky you have to see in an open-air cinema, perfectly a strangeness may expand their (and our) understanding of the cosmos.