This post was written by Michelle Gallina and originally appeared on the Adobe blog on November 4, 2025.Directed by Jafar Panahi, the 2025 Palme d’Or winner was his first feature since his 2023 imprisonment in Iran for protesting the arrest of a fellow filmmaker. Pahani applied those experiences into the film, which explores political repression through the eyes of six people who must decide whether to confront the man they believe once tortured them.While the film explores the heavy, moral weight of vengeance and justice on screen, the production team faced just as serious real-life challenges behind the camera — shooting and editing a film that risked political retaliation, exile, incarceration, or worse.Editing in the ShadowsDue to filmmaking limitations in Iran, It Was Just an Accident had to be shot and edited entirely in secret. When Panahi asked editor Amir Etminan to join the project, he made the risks clear: if their work was discovered, Etminan faced potential arrest and a permanent ban from the country.As a result, Etminan started cutting the film from a safehouse in Tehran. Under constant threat of discovery, he worked completely offline for safeguarding, completing 18-hour days editing in Adobe Premiere on a modest 2020 MacBook Air with just 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.The footage — more than 2TB of daily RED Komodo material — was far too large for his machine, so Etminan devised a strategy: creating lightweight proxy files with Media Encoder and storing these on ultra-fast SSDs. The original footage...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Monday, 8 December