The New Yorker:

The activist and Oscar-nominated co-writer of “It Was Just an Accident” speaks about the abuses he’s witnessed and endured, war between the U.S. and Iran, and the true stories behind the film.

By Cora Engelbrecht

On a rainy winter afternoon in 2001, Mehdi Mahmoudian, a political dissident in Tehran, noticed a man with an amputated hand struggling to repair his car. Mahmoudian, who was in his twenties, worked in a nearby print shop. He immediately recognized the man as a former guard who had used his left hand to torture Mahmoudian in Towhid Prison two years earlier.

Mahmoudian decided to help his torturer. He invited the man into his shop, offered him tea, and recruited a co-worker to fix his car. Hours later, when the man was preparing to leave, Mahmoudian reintroduced himself as his former prisoner. Stunned, the man drove away without responding. But he returned to the print shop the next day and asked for Mahmoudian’s forgiveness. He said it was the fault of the authorities; he was just doing his job, and he regretted it.

The encounter bears striking parallels to the opening of the film “It Was Just an Accident,” which Mahmoudian co-wrote with the Iranian director Jafar Panahi. In an early scene, an auto mechanic named Vahid recognizes his former torturer by the distinctive squeak of his prosthetic leg. Vahid kidnaps the man, nicknamed Peg-Leg, in a white van, and collects a ragtag team of former detainees from across Tehran to try to certify his identity. The feature was shot over twenty-eight days, covertly, mostly within the confines of the van.

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