The architects of the French Revolution had the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Activists on U.S. campuses in the 1960s had the Port Huron Statement. And the democratic activists of Iran have It Was Just an Accident, a movie up for two Oscars on Sunday. It’s partly a thriller, partly a dark comedy, and entirely an expression of how the Islamic Republic of Iran might be dissolved without a shot fired.

“Experience in the Middle East has shown that wars will not create a stable democracy,” says Hussein Razzagh, an Iranian journalist who did time in Tehran’s Evin Prison with both the director and screenwriter, who share a nomination for Best Original Screenplay. “This film shows the way.”

It Was Just an Accident, which won the top prize at the Cannes film festival, is also nominated for Best International Feature Film. In it, a mechanic abducts a customer he’s almost certain is the man who years earlier tortured him sadistically in prison. To make sure, he carries him in the back of a van to the homes of other victims, in what becomes a tour of the national psyche. Some want the man to suffer just as they did. Others refuse to lower themselves to the level of their torturers. Others vacillate.

The movie has laughs, but it goes straight at the question looming over Iran’s future even before the U.S. and Israel set out to topple its authoritarian regime: Is it possible to show your oppressors compassion they did not show you? Screenwriter Mehdi Mahmoudian, who was released from Evin just 11 days before the air assault began, told NPR the bombing depresses him. "If we cannot break this cycle of violence,” he said, “it will go on forever."

That’s the ultimate message of It Was Just an Accident, which its director, Jafar Panahi, conceived after his own release from Evin. 

In Iran, a lot of people cycle through prison, none more frequently than the activists, intellectuals, and political operatives who, in a better world, might be running the country.

Indeed, what’s been called “Evin University” bears similarities to Robben Island, the apartheid-era prison from which Nelson Mandela and fellow political prisoners emerged to govern South Africa. And though Iran has neither an organized political opposition comparable to the African National Congress, nor a regime currently inclined to hand over power, the population of its prisons includes a Nobel Peace laureate, the widely respected political godfather of the reform movement, and leaders from every strand of civil society.

"Over the years, because they keep arresting folks, the prisoners know each other,” says Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American who spent eight years in Evin. “There's an alumni association of this so-called Evin University. You're a monarchist, you end up there. You're an MKO [Mojahedin-e-Khalq Organization] guy, a former reformist, a republican—every kind is in there. And unlike the opposition outside, inside, these people are cordial. They talk to each other, they interact, and there's respect.”

That comity is the model for a sudden, surprise effort to form a united front: The Iran Freedom Congress, which is planned for March 28 and 29 in London. Its stated goal is not to choose leaders or prepare a future government for Iran, but rather to demonstrate that Iranians who claim to be on the same side can get along. Iran opposition groups are notoriously fractious, but congress organizers hope that they can come to see the value of pluralism and a shared goal. The very announcement of the congress is encouraging—that 30 groups managed to meet discreetly in February and agree on it without leaks or social media food fights. “They are coming together right now—already,” says Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran.

“This congress, for the first time since the 1979 revolution, has managed to gather representatives from every single denomination in Iran, whether it's ethnic groups like Turks, Arabs, Kurds—all the Kurds are there—Baluch, civil society groups, unions,” says Razzagh. Now based in Europe, he will attend the conference to represent 17 prominent activists who signed a statement accusing Iran’s supreme leader of “crimes against humanity” for the massacre of thousands of protestors in January. Also among the 17 are Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi and sociologist Saeed Madani, both imprisoned; women’s rights activist Nasrin Sotoudeh; and the filmmakers.

The ambitious effort, which Gaemi hopes may prove a model for a constitutional convention, exists both as an alternative to the U.S.-Israeli military campaign and as an off-ramp. President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he’s looking for Iran’s equivalent of the Venezuelan vice president, who assumed control of the country after U.S. forces abducted President Nicolás Maduro. None has emerged in Tehran.

“What we hope will happen is, if [Trump] does negotiate an end of the hostilities with anyone, that part of that negotiation is forcing them to come into a political transition,” says Gaemi. “If America doesn't want to come back in five to ten years to repeat what it’s doing now, then you should understand that this is really not just military defeat of the adversary but also laying the grounds for transition out of Islamic Republic.

“And,” he added, “I think it's quite possible there are probably people hidden within the regime who are also hoping for such an outcome.”

So too might many of those who support the Islamic Republic, estimated at 10 to 20% of Iran’s 93 million people. Their numbers include not only the faithful who have been answering calls to fill the streets chanting for its new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, but also members of the security apparatus, many of whom have both fears about retribution and access to firearms. “Our focus is to make even them understand that they should accept the agency of the people,” Razzagh says of regime loyalists. “That in a peaceful transition, at least part of them would be involved. Otherwise it would lead either to civil war or the breakup of the country.”

It’s an outcome that, however difficult or unlikely, would leave the fate of the country in the hands of Iranians, Razzagh says, and their own decisions about whether to look back, or forward. They’ll face, in other words, a version of the dilemma at the heart of It Was Just an Accident—which is why some see in it the potential to be a foundational document for a new era, even more than just an award-winning film.

 “Instead of getting involved in endless cycles of violence–people remembering all the violence that was done to them by interrogators, and taking vengeance—we should break the cycle, and have a peaceful transition,” he says. “The plot of the movie actually could happen.”