Panah Panahi
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“My Method is Invisible Editing”: Editor Amir Etminan on “It Was Just an Accident”
From its opening head-on shot of a family driving down an unlit road to its devastating, confrontational climax, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident frequently deploys long takes to situate the audience within moral discomfort. While that formal restraint runs through the entire film, it still leaves room for a diverse editing style befitting Panahi’s first feature since the suspension of his twenty-year filmmaking ban. (Following the film’s release, the Iranian government has subsequently sentenced him to one year in prison in absentia for “propaganda activities.”) In its shot selection and fluctuating cutting rhythm, It Was Just an Accident […]
by Sabine Hoffman on Dec 17, 2025 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 2: Benedetta, Hit the Road
Dutch director Paul Verhoeven’s “lesbian nun movie” Benedetta may have taken two extra years to land (Verhoeven’s hip surgery in 2019 prevented him from completing post-production in time for that year’s Cannes), but its prologue wastes no time informing the audience of its mischievous timbre (for the handful heading into it expecting anything close to reverence), slipping in flame-farting jesters and a bird (ostensibly possessed by the Virgin Mary) dropping a turd in a bandit’s eye at our young heroine’s request. Adapted from Judith C. Brown’s 1986 book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, the […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 10, 2021
