Our first screening is in celebration of the International Day of Peace! Join us to watch the Iranian political thriller and dark comedy “It Was Just an Accident.” The film won multiple awards, including the 2025 Cannes’ Palme d’Or and was a 2026 Oscar nominee for best screenplay and best international feature film.

Pizza and an interactive panel discussion will follow the screening. Learn more about the making of the film and Iran’s sociopolitical culture, and engage in conversations with our panelists: ACC Radio-Television-Film professor and department chair, Dr. Mark Cunningham; ACC Psychology professor and director of the Peace & Conflict Studies Center, Dr. Shirin Khosropour, and UT-Austin professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Dr. Babak Tabarraee.

In this Palme d’Or winner from the Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi, a chance encounter sets in motion an urgent moral thriller. When a stranded driver walks into his shop, mechanic Vahid believes he has come face-to-face with Eqbal, a notoriously brutal guard who tortured him during his political imprisonment. Gathering a band of fellow former inmates and other allies, Vahid sets out to take justice into his own hands—but does he have the right man? Shot in secret after Panahi’s longtime ban from filmmaking in his home country, It Was Just an Accident is a tour de force of sustained tension and mordant humor, provocatively shifting perspectives to examine vital questions of trauma and revenge. (source: The Criterion Collection)

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Babak Tabarraee is an assistant professor of instruction and the coordinator of the Persian program at The University of Texas at Austin. He has published three books of fiction in Iran as well as more than 20 literary and theoretical books translated from English into Persian and vice versa. His academic writings in English have appeared in Mashriq & Mahjar, Dibur, Iranian Studies, The Soundtrack, Cinephile, Film Quarterly, The Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, and The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema. He is currently working on two screenplays as well as a Persian grammar companion.