Asghar Farhadi Lives in Iran, but Won’t Make Movies There

Asghar Farhadi returns to the Cannes competition for the fifth time with his 10th feature, “Parallel Tales,” loosely inspired by the late Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1988 “Dekalog: Six,” covering the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

Five years ago, Farhadi, who lives with his family in Tehran, was approached to participate in a TV series adapting all ten of the one-hour Dekalogs. Farhadi was not interested in making television and proceeded to shoot “A Hero” (2021), which won him the Cannes Grand Prix and also landed him in court on plagiarism charges. He was eventually acquitted on the grounds that the real-life incident that inspired the film, which a student in one of his film workshops turned into a documentary, was in the pubic domain.

The “Dekalog” series producers came back to Farhadi with an offer to make a film based on one of the Dekalogs. That interested him. “Parallel Tales” marks his second film shot in French (“The Past,” starring Berenice Bejo, won Best Actress at Cannes in 2022), and he shot another film, “Everybody Knows” (2017), starring Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, in Spanish.

We sat down on a blustery day on the roof terrace of the Marriott Hotel in Cannes to discuss it all.

Asghar Farhadi: Of course, I’d rather work in my country, in my language, in the society I’m familiar with, but at the same time, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have curiosity, this challenge of trying to live new experiences and try and see how I can manage to make a film in a less familiar context. But as I’ve said before, I won’t work in Iran again as long as I have to ask for a permit and not work freely.

Farhadi: The first film that I saw was “[Three Colors: Blue],” and I was mesmerized. The silence of the film made me realize that I had to discover him urgently, so I watched all his other films at the time, and I still feel a lot of respect for him. I admire his work, especially some of his early works that I discovered more recently, like his documentary, “Talking Heads,” a brilliant philosophical film. There was something unique about him, and I realized it even more by listening to him talk about his films. Of course, he is a humanist filmmaker; he has a sense of concern and compassion for his characters, as if they were true people. He cares about his characters, and how he has achieved compassion for them is interesting.

Farhadi: They came again: “OK, no problem. If you have no interest in the series. Why don’t you choose one of the episodes and turn it into a feature film? Just use it as an inspiration for a feature film of yours.” And this, of course, was more tempting. I went back to thinking about it, I thought, “What’s the point of making a remake? I’ve never done anything like that, and if a film is good, if it still has some impact, some value, what’s the point of really making it?” So I started talking with my co-writer Saeed Farhadi about how I can make one of these episodes just a shell, a frame into which I would make a story that would be more personal. And finally, I chose “A Short Story About Love,” Episode Six, because that’s the one that had stayed me most. I didn’t see them again.

What I liked in this was two aspects: First was the character of the older lady, her solitude (Isabelle Huppert). I found there was always something to develop and to explore. And another aspect was the fact that this character, who’s a voyeur and fantasizes about this woman that she sees through a telescope, only has an image to fantasize about. There are no words, no sound. What if we brought sound in the story, and sound became also one of the important elements? That’s how we came up with the idea of having the people being foley artists.

That worked well, the contrast of sound and silence. But the film, while entertaining, is a radically different style from the stories you’ve made before, which lean more toward neorealism.

Farhadi: These are two stories intertwined. In the first part of the film, you see a lot of the fiction written by [the Huppert character], so it’s her world, it’s not mine, because it’s her novel, that’s the story that she did. But then as you move on in the film, it’s more and more realistic, the world is closer to what I’ve done before, and these are not the conscious decisions that you make as a filmmaker, you just let the story drive you where it needs to go, and that’s how I came up with this mixture.

Farhadi: We’re living in the world of narratives, there are plenty of narratives around us, stories that are told to us. We are told what to think, and how to perceive things through the stories that are told, and with the narratives that are created, especially with social media, we’re peeping into everybody’s lives. And then we fantasize about their lives, thinking we have some knowledge.

Farhadi: You’re absolutely right, my daughters are my greatest teachers these days.

You had to deal with plagiarism charges around “A Hero,” and you were eventually acquitted because the story you tell in the movie was public knowledge. You deal with plagiarism in “Parallel Tales” as well.

Farhadi: Maybe it’s an unconscious consequence of what I went through, but as a matter of fact, Kieślowski’s project came before that story, so I don’t know if it’s related.

How do you feel about the Academy rule change making key non-English-language festival prize winners eligible for the Best International Film Oscar?

Farhadi: It’s a good and wise decision, and an important one. It will take time, but in the long term, it will bring a lot of good films. We have been fighting for this change.

Is it possible to make an Iranian movie away from Iran, in other locations, with a diaspora of actors and crew that are in other places?

Farhadi: No, no, no. It would be expensive if you want to reconstruct the locations in Turkey or in Georgia. But I wouldn’t have a problem, even if I wanted to make a purely Iranian film out of Iran.