Asghar Farhadi
In any other year, The Salesman (2016) would have been the story of the 89th Academy Awards. The film, from acclaimed Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It was the second win in the category for Farhadi, making him the sixth director to win the award more than once (alongside legends like Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa) and the first director to do so in the twenty-first century. Farhadi’s stature in Iran made this win even more significant; with his 2011 film, A Separation, having been the first Iranian film to win an Academy Award in any category, he was already a legend in his home country.
This momentous achievement was blackened by the surrounding circumstances. Farhadi didn’t attend the ceremony; Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-American engineer, accepted the award on his behalf. She read a statement from the director explaining that his ‘absence [was] out of respect for the people of [Iran], and those of other six nations, [who] have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the U.S.’ This was, of course, a reference to President Donald Trump’s so-called Muslim Ban, legislation prohibiting travellers from a number of Muslim-majority nations – including Iran – from travelling to the United States.
Farhadi is an accomplished dramatist who, over the course of eight feature films, has demonstrated an inimitable ability to cut into the marrow of human nature.
In any other year, this would have been a defining moment of the ceremony. But this wasn’t any other year. This was 2017: the year that Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway walked on to announce the award for Best Picture. One frenzied cloud of envelopes, accountants and outright confusion later, no-one was talking about Asghar Farhadi.
But that’s precisely who I’ll be talking about in this piece. That Oscar win, though overshadowed on the night, cemented him as one of the great directors of his generation. Farhadi is an accomplished dramatist who, over the course of eight feature films (counting Everybody Knows, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May this year), has demonstrated an inimitable ability to cut into the marrow of human nature. His filmography – for which he has served not only as director but also, in every instance, as either writer or co-writer – is defined by moral melodramas that push their players to their limits, insightfully interrogating how we behave within the strictures of our own ethical codes and the social systems surrounding us.
The popular discourse around Iranian filmmakers prefers to frame them as artists railing against an oppressive system. When writing about internationally acclaimed Iranian directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Rakhshān Banietemad and especially Jafar Panahi, Western critics and journalists emphasise the challenges these filmmakers face (such as Panahi’s house arrest ). While the restrictive censorship of the Iranian regime – both now and in the past – cannot be denied, this rhetoric reinforces a view of the West as a bastion of freedom and permission in contrast to the authoritarian East.
It’s tempting to read Farhadi’s second Oscar win, under a cloud of racist US international policy, as a rejection or even an inversion of this narrative. To wonder – in the inimitable words of David Mitchell and Robert Webb – ‘Are we the baddies?’ Yet Farhadi’s statement on the night rejects that tendency; he writes that ‘dividing the world into the “us” and “our enemies” categories