Asghar Farhadi turns ordinary family quarrels into moral thrillers
Asghar Farhadi's films rarely involve villains. A couple argues over a divorce, a holiday trip goes wrong, a stranger's attack unsettles a marriage, and the audience is left unsure who is right. That approach made him the first Iranian to win a competitive Academy Award, and then he won another.
Farhadi was born in 1972 in Homayoon Shahr, near Isfahan. At 15 he joined the local branch of the Iranian Youth Cinema Society and began making short films on 8 mm and 16 mm stock. He went on to study theatre at university in Tehran, wrote plays and screenplays for state television, and directed his first feature, Dancing in the Dust, in 2003, the story of a man struggling to pay off his marriage dowry.
Early films established his method. The Beautiful City follows a young prisoner turning 18 in detention, and Fireworks Wednesday, set in the days before Persian New Year, keeps shifting its point of view so the viewer keeps revising judgements about each character. About Elly, a seaside trip on the Caspian coast that turns tragic, won him the Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin, and the critic David Bordwell called it a masterpiece.
A Separation made him internationally famous. It became the first Iranian film to win Berlin's Golden Bear, took the Golden Globe and on 26 February 2012 won the Oscar for best foreign-language film. Roger Ebert praised its portrait of decent people trying to do right in a country often caricatured abroad. That same year Time named him among its most influential people and France gave him the Legion of Honour.
He then worked abroad, making The Past in French, for which Bérénice Bejo won best actress at Cannes, and later Everybody Knows in Spain. Between them came The Salesman, about a couple shaken after the wife is assaulted, woven around a staging of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It won best screenplay at Cannes and a second Oscar in 2017. He did not attend that ceremony, protesting a US travel ban on Iranians. Back home, A Hero won the Cannes Grand Prix.
Source: Asghar Farhadi
