From California to Tehran, this year has been all about films that fight back film

HeyOn March 8, Mahmoud Khalil became the first of many pro-Palestinian protesters on campus to be arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He was detained for three months, without being able to deliver his first child, by an administration that distorted his opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as encouraging terrorism, while abusing immigration policy to silence him.

In movies this year, I was repeatedly reminded of Khalil and others who saw their altruistic activism reframed as violent threats to be eliminated, in characters whose plights followed similar trajectories. In Wicked: For Good, Elphaba’s attempts to expose the lies told in Oz turn into death threats. In Superman, Kal-El is investigated for being a foreign agent when he defends a society suffering from violent US-backed occupation. Even in Zootopia 2, a female rabbit cop is charged with attempted murder as she uncovers an attempt to uproot marginalized populations from their lands and erase their history.

In contrast to those examples (and there are more), the most compelling — and, in my opinion, best — films this year have dropped the bar on what science fiction and fantasy have to offer. They give us stories of fraught idealism and resistance to oppressive states that address with immediacy and urgency what people around the world are experiencing at this moment.

Jafar Panahi’s film It Was Just an Accident is about former political prisoners who believe they have found the man who tortured them on behalf of the Iranian regime. Secret Agent Kleber Mendonça Filho follows a professor in hiding during the 1970s military dictatorship in Brazil. As for the movie “Battle After Another,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio plays the role of a former revolutionary fleeing fascist forces in the United States, and his paranoia is not just a byproduct of the substances he abuses.

These films form a triptych that scooped up multiple Best Picture, Director, and International Film Awards in unison, just like the one we celebrated two years ago, when Killers of the Flower Moon, The Zone of Interest, and Oppenheimer each explored in their own ways how people divide their humanity to commit or internalize genocide (those films, by the way, premiered only months before the Gaza siege). This year’s films also speak to and reinforce each other, telling stories not about individual heroes, but about communities bound together by systemic oppression, building solidarity. And they all cut the tension with absurd, absurd humor: security guards in “It Was Just an Accident” hacking mobile credit card terminals to take bribes; The severed leg in The Secret Agent jumps and kicks gays in the park, standing in for a brutal police force that abuses marginalized communities; And it’s almost all about the white supremacists calling themselves the Christmas Adventurers Club in battle after battle. These gags invite us to laugh at how evil forces misuse their powers, without diminishing how terrifying it is to live in her world.

The most infuriating yet incredibly sympathetic film of this batch is It Was Just an Accident, which not only depicts ordinary people opposing their government, but is itself an act of resistance, conducted in a typically secretive manner (for Panahi) to avoid Iranian censorship. The Palme d’Or-winning film was a product 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 spoken in its opening sequence. A man named Iqbal (Ibrahim Azizi) is driving his wife and daughter at night on a dark road when he accidentally hits a dog with his car. The horrified daughter blames her father for killing the dog. The parents try to reason with her. The dog died due to poor lighting on the road and perhaps even God’s will. The daughter remains unconvinced by their attempts to blame the infrastructure and belief systems that shape their daily lives, rather than taking individual responsibility.

This tension continues throughout the rest of the film, when Iqbal is knocked unconscious, bound, and held in the back of a truck by an anxious coalition of former political prisoners. They are convinced that he was the one who tortured them but are unsure how to positively identify him or what to do if their suspicions prove true.

This is the desperate case of a tragicomedy that explores Tehran’s social scene (particularly the progress of the Women’s Life and Freedom movement, where young women roam the streets and consider the hijab optional), while also raising questions about the country’s future. After the fall of the regime, how do the people bear the shock? What to do with those who cooperated with the state? Do they blame the system or do they follow that little daughter’s instinct and hold individuals responsible for their actions? In poignant ways, the children guide the film’s moral compass, especially after their surprise birth offers a warm sense of hope for the next generation.

This forward-looking feeling is also present in The Secret Agent, a paranoid political thriller that moves like Three Days of the Condor by way of No Country for Old Men to the beat of a samba drum. It’s 1977. The carnival is heating up. Wagner Moura’s professor, Armando, makes plans to escape the country. He has been smeared in the local media by bad agents because he dared to criticize the corrupt bureaucrat who lines his pockets with public funds. He is also being pursued by an assassin allied with the local police chief.

All of these characters are either fathers or father figures to young people following in their footsteps, a generational thread that reaches home when the secret agent jumps into the present tense. Young archivists listen to Armando’s recorded testimonies as part of recent reconciliation efforts in Brazil. Wagner reappears, now playing Armando’s son, in a bittersweet ending that reflects on cultural memory (or is it amnesia?), and how threats from the past can easily resurface for a new generation. Filho and Moura have 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 prison sentence for plotting a coup) emulated the military dictatorship of the 1970s.

Emerging fascist forces also pose a threat in “Battle After Battle,” in which Bob DiCaprio, a former revolutionary, rushes to protect his daughter Willa while both are pursued by an American colonel troubled by their past (Sean Penn’s iconic performance needs no further ink here).

Anderson’s exhilarating, blockbuster girl-dad thriller, with its high-adrenaline action scenes and prickly observations about race and morbid extremism, is remarkable both for its forward-moving momentum but also for the sense that it’s stuck (or unmoored) in time. The film, which borrows liberally from the past (the Weathermen’s radical action, Gil Scott-Heron’s recurring verses), opens with a prologue that appears to be set today, as revolutionaries DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor break immigrants out of an ICE-like detention center. When the film jumps forward 16 years, it still seems set around today. “Nothing’s changed,” Taylor’s Berfidia Beverly Hills says in voiceover, introducing a second act in which immigrants are once again violently rounded up by armed forces whose counterinsurgency tactics (including one soldier manufacturing consent to brutalize civilians by throwing a Molotov cocktail at his unit) must serve as a wake-up call to what’s been happening in the streets.

No wonder Bob is confused and agitated when someone working on the secret revolutionary hotline asks him to answer the question, “What time is it?” It’s all a blur, really. The only way to mark the passage of time in battle after battle is through Bob’s 16-year-old daughter. Ironically, the wonderful actor who plays Willa is named Chase Infinity.

She emerges as the film’s comforting hope for the future, a sentiment shared not only by It Was Just an Accident and Secret Agent but also by those of us inspiring the next generation. They are fighting back, on screen and on campus.