Asghar Farhadi Makes Films for the World—And the World Is Listening
Asghar Farhadi speaks in a global language. Over the course of our conversation about his latest film, A Hero, the award-winning Iranian director references the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman as inspirations. He finds his own movies resonating everywhere, he says, and has come to understand why. “People all around the world, their similarities are way more than their differences,” he tells me over Zoom, through a translator. “It’s because our basis in cinema is the human emotion.”
This is certainly true, at the very least, of Farhadi’s cinema, which consists largely of Iranian stories of parents and spouses complicated by secrets and revelations. His narratives, intimate in scope, consistently reach for a universal truth—just one reason why he’s among the most highly regarded directors alive. He shares a rare feat with two of his idols, Bergman and Kurosawa: They’re three of a very, very small group to have helmed multiple Oscar winners for best international film (formerly known as best foreign-language film). Remarkably, Farhadi is the only one to have done so in the 21st century.
And he’s done so by making movies about his home. Days after directing a film in Spain—2019’s Everybody Knows, starring Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz—Farhadi returned to Iran and got to thinking about the next movie he’d make in his country of birth and residence. Once more, he felt inspired not by a particular strand of Iranian politics or conflict, but something far more wide-reaching.
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Here’s where Brecht comes into play: As a university student, Farhadi was struck by the play Life of Galileo, which begins with the famed scientist replectating the novel telescope and selling it as his own creation—only to be found out and crucified for it. “It always stayed with me,” Farhadi says, but “I never thought that I would write a movie or a play or anything about that concept.” Then, 20 years later, it came back to him.
“At the end of the day it’s about the connection of this person and the society," Asghar Farhadi says of his new film, A Hero.
Courtesy of Amazon Studios.A Hero follows Rahim (Amir Jadidi), a young man imprisoned over an unpaid debt to his brother-in-law. (For those unfamiliar with the Iranian justice system, it quickly presents as quite different from most in the West.) On a two-day leave, during which Rahim plans to settle what he owes, his secret girlfriend comes across a bag filled with gold coins. Rahim initially considers taking the coins to secure his freedom, then devises a more complex plan: make a story out of returning the bag to its rightful owner, rather than taking the money for himself—and, accordingly, pretend he’s the one who found the bag.
The film offers a vibrant portrait of the city of Shiraz, and laces it with a withering societal critique. In its simple setup, Farhadi crafts a complex morality tale with palpable suspense. Things get messy, inevitably, and Rahim’s fate almost takes a back seat to the tension surrounding his sudden public role. He becomes a local celebrity, with all eyes on him. His sister tells him to stop smoking, to clean up his image; his motives and history are increasingly scrutinized. Farhadi himself had seen stories like this play out in local news across Iran, and discovered a core uniting idea as he got to working on the film: “They wanted to get that person to act the same way that they’d acted at that moment—like the hero…. That person [must] try to satisfy the picture that the society asked him to be.”
Life bustles through every frame: Scenes of Rahim’s chaotic homelife find kids glued to iPhones, food being plated, reunions between relatives happening in the same shot. Farhadi mines humor in the collective obsession with Rahim’s “good deed”—which, as one character points out, is less heroic than merely the decent thing to do—that gives way to something much sadder and deeper. Farhadi calls his mission with A Hero “getting to a height of pain,” in telling the story of a man who exploited his community’s desperation for an example of decency, of humanity, of hope. Who can’t relate to that?
“Unlike how it seems, reality is very hard to replicate,” Farhadi says. “It’s a real challenge for me to be able to record reality.”
Courtesy of Amazon Studios.Farhadi was not present to accept the Oscar for his last winning film, The Salesman—a clever, wrenching domestic drama spun off from Arthur Miller’s iconic play. In the early months of 2017, just before the Academy Awards, newly elected President Donald Trump had instituted a travel ban from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran. Whether he could have ultimately traveled or not, Farhadi, in protest, did not consider attending.
“My absence is out of respect for the people of my country,” Farhadi had said in a statement at the time. “Dividing the world into the ‘us’ and ‘our enemies’ categories creates fear. A deceitful justification for aggression and war. These wars prevent democracy and human rights in countries which have themselves been victims of aggression. Filmmakers can turn their cameras to capture shared human qualities and break stereotypes of various nationalities and religions. They create empathy between us and others. An empathy which we need today more than ever.”
To that point, Farhadi’s work speaks for itself. He first noticed the power of his medium with his best-known work, 2011’s Oscar-winning A Separation, which also earned him a nomination for best original screenplay. The film was hailed at the time as a groundbreaking work amid Iran’s rigid censorship laws; it told the story of a separating couple and the child between them in a way that kept things intimate and personal, while still fashioning an exacting depiction of the social and religious divides around them that propelled the conflict. “I never really tried to have a universal language in any of my films…. But Japan, Sweden, everywhere—people related to that one,” Farhadi says now. “This tells me something very important: Being local and being universal are not in contrast. They’re not facing each other.”
“Human emotions are very similar all around the world,” says Farhadi. “A mother’s love for her son or daughter all around the world is the same.”
Courtesy of Amazon Studios.That goes for awards, it must be said too. Amazon Studios, which is distributing A Hero, is planning a significant campaign for the film that’s been hailed as Farhadi’s best since A Separation. (It’ll make its North American premiere this long weekend at the Telluride Film Festival, a pivotal stopover for contenders.) In the decade since that film made waves, the Academy’s directing branch, particularly, has gone more international—see Thomas Vinterberg’s shocker of a nom last year for Another Round—while Farhadi, who has yet to be recognized in the category, has only built in profile, collaborating with A-listers like Bardem and Cruz and, after multiple appearances, winning his biggest jury award yet at the Cannes Film Festival for A Hero—the grand prize—earlier this year.
A wider Academy embrace may again come Farhadi’s way, as he continues to push himself to meet new challenges in his work. A Hero is his first film, he says, in which “there is nothing hidden,” no secret to be uncovered. That kind of discovery, of how he can tell a story, keeps him going. In conversation, you sense a director constantly alive and open to the possibilities of the art he’s creating. “I never think that I’ve learned filmmaking,” he says with a laugh. “Filmmaking is like driving a car—you can’t ever say that you’re a good driver, [because] you just have to have an accident one time, and then you’re not.”
So far, thankfully, he’s got a very clean record.
A Hero makes its North American premiere this weekend at the Telluride Film Festival. Following an awards qualifying run in November, the film will hit select theaters on January 7, 2022 before streaming on Prime Video starting January 21. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.
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