On 8 March, Mahmoud Khalil became the first among several college campus pro-Palestinian protesters to be detained by ICE. He was held for three months, missing the birth of his first child, by an administration that smeared his opposition to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza as cheerleading for terrorism, while abusing immigration policy to silence him.
At the movies this year, I was repeatedly reminded of Khalil, and others who have seen their altruistic activism reframed as violent threats that need to be snuffed out, in characters whose plights followed similar tracts. In Wicked: For Good, Elphaba’s attempts to expose the lies told in Oz are twisted into death threats. In Superman, Kal-El is investigated for being a foreign agent when he defends a community suffering under violent US-backed occupation. Even in Zootopia 2, a bunny cop is framed for attempted murder because she is exposing an attempt to eradicate a marginalized population from their lands and erase their history.
Unlike those examples (and there are more), the most compelling – and in my mind, best – movies this year dropped the buffer that science-fiction and fantasy have to offer. They gave us stories of fraught idealism and resistance to oppressive states that more immediately and urgently engage with what people across the globe are witnessing in this moment.
Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident is about former political prisoners who think they found the man who tortured them on behalf of the Iranian regime. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent follows a professor in hiding during the 70s military dictatorship in Brazil. And Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a stoner former revolutionary on the run from fascist forces in the US, his paranoia not just a byproduct of the substances he abuses.
Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent. Photograph: AP
These films form a triptych that have been scoring several critics’ best picture, director and international film prizes in unison, much like the one we celebrated a couple years ago, when Killers of the Flower Moon, The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer explored in their own ways how people compartmentalize their humanity to commit or accommodate genocide (incidentally those movies premiered just months before the siege on Gaza). This year’s movies also speak to and reinforce each other, telling stories not of individual heroes but of communities, tied together by systemic oppression, building solidarity. And they all cut through the tension with morbid and absurdist humor: the security guards in It Was Just An Accident busting out portable credit card terminals to take bribes; the dismembered leg in The Secret Agent hopping around, kicking down the gay occupants in a park, standing in for a brutal police force abusing marginalized communities; and almost everything about the white supremacists who call themselves the Christmas Adventurers Club in One Battle After Another. These gags invite us to laugh at how pathetic sinister forces abusing their powers can be, without tempering how scary it is to live in their world.
The most righteously infuriating but incredibly empathetic among this batch is It Was Just An Accident, which doesn’t just portray the everyday people who oppose their government but is, in its own existence, an act of resistance, made in typical clandestine fashion (for Panahi) to avoid Iranian censorship. The Palme d’Or-winning film was borne out of Panahi’s recent imprisonment (for making films deemed “propaganda” against the regime), when he absorbed stories from fellow political prisoners that would inspire his characters in It Was Just An Accident.
The film’s title is uttered in its opening sequence. A man named Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) is driving his wife and daughter at night along a dark road when he accidentally strikes a dog with his car. The horrified young daughter blames her father for killing the dog. The parents try to reason with her. The dog died because of the poorly lit road and perhaps even the will of Allah. The daughter remains unconvinced by their attempts at shifting the blaming to the infrastructure and belief systems that shape their daily lives, instead of taking individual responsibility.
That tension lingers over the rest of the movie, when Eghbal is knocked unconscious, hog-tied and held in the back of a van by an anxious alliance of former political prisoners. They are convinced that he was their torturer but are unsure how to positively identify him or what to do if their suspicions prove true.
That’s the desperate set up in a tragicomic road movie that surveys the social landscape in Tehran (notably the progress borne from the Women, Life, Freedom movement as young women roam the streets treating headscarves as optional), while also asking questions for the country’s future. After the regime falls, how do the people carry the trauma? And what to do with those who collaborated with the state? Do they blame the system or follow that young daughter’s instinct, holding individuals accountable for their actions? In moving ways, the film’s moral compass is guided by children, especially after a surprise birth introduces a warm sense of hope for the next generation.
That forward looking sentiment is there in The Secret Agent too, a paranoid political thriller that moves like Three Days of the Condor by way of No Country for Old Men to a samba drumbeat. It’s 1977. Carnival is raging. And Wagner Moura’s Armando, a professor, makes plans to escape the country. He is being smeared in local media by bad agents because he dared to criticize a corrupt bureaucrat lining his own pockets with public funds. He is also stalked by an assassin in league with a local police chief.
Jafar Panahi after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Photograph: Natacha Pisarenko/Invision/AP
All these characters are either fathers or father figures to young men following in their footsteps, a generational thread that hits home when The Secret Agent jumps ahead to the present tense. Young archivists listen to Armando’s recorded testimonies as part of Brazil’s recent reconciliation efforts. Wagner re-emerges, now playing Armando’s son, in a bittersweet coda reflecting on cultural memory (or is it amnesia?), and how threats from the past can just as easily re-emerge for a new generation. Filho and Moura said as much in interviews, explaining that their collaboration on the film began when the far-right government overseen by former president Jair Bolsonaro (who is currently serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup) echoed the 1970s military dictatorship.
Re-emerging fascist forces are also the threat in One Battle After Another, in which DiCaprio’s Bob, a former revolutionary, scrambles to protect his daughter Willa while both are hunted by a wacked-out US colonel from their past (Sean Penn’s celebrated performance needs no further ink here).
Anderson’s exhilarating and monumental girl-dad thriller, packing high-adrenaline action sequences and thorny observations on race and fetishized radicalism, is remarkable both for its forward moving momentum but also the sense of being stuck (or unfixed) in time. The movie, which borrows liberally from the past (the radical action of the Weathermen, the repeated verses of Gil Scott-Heron), opens with a prologue that appears to be set today, as DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor’s revolutionaries break out migrants from an ICE-like detention center. When the movie jumps ahead 16 years, it still seems like it is set today. “Nothing’s changed,” says Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills in voiceover, introducing a second act in which migrants are once again violently rounded up by militant forces whose counterinsurgency tactics (including a soldier manufacturing consent to brutalize civilians by tossing a Molotov cocktail at his own unit) should be a wakeup call for what has been happening on the streets.
No wonder Bob is confused and agitated whenever he’s prompted by an operator on a secret revolutionary hotline to answer the question “What time is it?” It’s all a blur, really. The only way to mark the passage of time in One Battle After Another is through Bob’s 16-year-old daughter. Ironically, the wonderful actor playing Willa is named Chase Infiniti.
She emerges as the movie’s comforting hope for the future, a sentiment shared not just with It Was Just An Accident and The Secret Agent but also among those of us inspired by the next generation. They resist, onscreen and on college campuses.
