No Villain in the Room: Asghar Farhadi, Iran, and the Moral Cinema of His Generation
Asghar Farhadi makes detective stories in which the question is never who did it. The question is what happened, and once that is half-established, who is answerable for it. His ten features turn on small events: a woman vanishes from a beach, an old man is left tied to a bed, a stranger walks into a bathroom, a bag of gold coins is handed back. Around each event he assembles decent people with conflicting obligations and partial knowledge, and then he lets the law, the family, money, class, religion and reputation do their work. He is usually described as the least political of the major Iranian directors. That description is half right. He has never made a film about a demonstration, a prison cell or an interrogation. But every one of his Iranian plots is driven by a specific institution of the Islamic Republic: blood money, the family court, the oath on the Quran, the debtors’ prison, the rule that a woman’s hair must be covered even in her own kitchen. And his career has been shaped at every stage by the state that licensed his films, suspended his permits, celebrated his Oscars, cancelled his homecoming and, by his own account, held his passport at the airport. This essay walks through the films in order with the history put back in. It then takes up the argument against him, which is serious, and places him among the directors of his own generation: Mungiu, Zvyagintsev, Ceylan, Kore-eda, Hamaguchi, the Dardennes. My claim is that Farhadi is the central figure of a worldwide school that has no name, a cinema of moral procedure, and that his own public life has come to resemble one of his scripts.
A child of the revolution
Farhadi was born on 7 May 1972 in Homayunshahr, a town outside Isfahan that was renamed Khomeynishahr after 1979. He was six when the Shah fell and eight when Iraq invaded. His childhood and adolescence coincided exactly with the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, the consolidation of clerical rule, and the remaking of everyday law along religious lines. He belongs to the first generation that has no adult memory of the old regime and no share in the making of the new one. It inherited the Islamic Republic as a fact. That matters for the films. The founders of the Iranian New Wave, Dariush Mehrjui, Bahram Beyzai, Abbas Kiarostami, were formed before the revolution and worked out their art against two successive censorships. Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a revolutionary militant who became a dissident. Farhadi’s generation did neither. Its subject is not the revolution but the society that came after it: urban, educated, connected to the outside world, short of money, and governed by rules that many of its members privately do not believe in. He began making short films as a teenager through the Iranian Young Cinema Society, a state-supported network that put 8mm and 16mm cameras in provincial towns. He then chose theatre over film school: a degree in dramatic arts at the University of Tehran, followed by a master’s in stage direction at Tarbiat Modares. The playwrights he studied are visible in everything that followed. From Ibsen he took the well-made domestic plot with a buried secret. From Chekhov he took the ensemble in a single house and the refusal of a verdict. From Arthur Miller he took the ordinary man destroyed by his need to be well thought of. His apprenticeship was in state broadcasting. Through the 1990s he wrote radio plays and then television serials for IRIB, including A Tale of a City, and in 2002 he co-wrote Ebrahim Hatamikia’s hijacking drama Low Heights. Two habits come from those years. One is craft: Farhadi’s scripts are engineered, with every prop and offhand remark paying off an hour later. The other is fluency in what may and may not be shown. He learned to write inside the licensing system of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, where a script needs a permit before shooting and the finished film needs another before release.
The reform years: three films about the price of a person
Farhadi’s first three features were made between 2003 and 2006, across the end of Mohammad Khatami’s reformist presidency and the arrival of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Khatami years had loosened the press and the cinema and raised expectations that the system could be liberalised from within. By 2003 that hope was fading. The films of this period, his included, have the mood of a society that has stopped expecting rescue and started counting costs. Dancing in the Dust (2003) follows Nazar, a young man from a poor Tehran neighbourhood who is pushed into divorcing the wife he loves because of rumours about her mother. He owes her the mahr, the sum a husband pledges at marriage and must pay on divorce, and he has no means of paying it. He ends up in the desert trailing an old man who catches snakes for their venom. It is the roughest of the films, but the mechanism is already in place: a rumour, a debt, a man’s standing among his neighbours, and a legal obligation that turns love into arithmetic. Beautiful City (2004) is the first major statement. Akbar killed his girlfriend at sixteen. On his eighteenth birthday he becomes eligible for execution. Under the principle of qisas, retribution in kind, the decision belongs not to the state but to the victim’s father, who may demand the death, forgive it, or accept diyeh, blood money. Akbar’s friend and Akbar’s sister set out to win a pardon. Then comes the turn that only Iranian law could supply. Because the victim was female, her blood money is valued at half a man’s. If her father insists on the execution, he must first pay the difference to the killer’s family. A poor, grieving man is told that his daughter’s life is worth less than her murderer’s and that justice will cost him money he does not have. Farhadi films this without a word of commentary. The title is the name of the district where the story is set. Nothing else in the film is ironic. This is where the distinction between law and morality enters his work, and it enters as a fact of statute. The legal system can price a death and assign a penalty. It cannot settle forgiveness, guilt or mercy, and by handing the decision to a private citizen it makes one family the executioner of another. Fireworks Wednesday (2006) moves up the class ladder and indoors. Rouhi, a young woman about to be married, is sent by an agency to clean the flat of a middle-class couple on Chaharshanbe Suri, the fire festival before the Persian New Year. The wife suspects the husband of an affair with the neighbour. Rouhi, an outsider with no stake, becomes the carrier of evidence between them and discovers that she can alter the outcome by what she chooses to repeat. Outside, firecrackers go off all day like gunfire. It is the prototype for A Separation: a working-class woman inside a bourgeois marriage, a truth that no one holds entire, and a city that sounds as though it is under attack.
About Elly and the summer of 2009
A group of old university friends, lawyers and professionals in their thirties, drive from Tehran to the Caspian for a long weekend. One of them, Sepideh, has brought along her daughter’s nursery teacher, Elly, hoping to match her with Ahmad, who is back from Germany after a divorce. On the second day a child nearly drowns, and when the panic subsides Elly is gone. What follows is the purest demonstration of the method. Nobody knows whether Elly drowned or simply left. Nobody, it turns out, even knows her full name. Then it emerges that she had a fiancé in Tehran, and that Sepideh knew. From that moment the question shifts from what happened to Elly to what can be said about her. A woman who accepted an introduction to another man while engaged has, in the code these modern people claim not to live by, compromised her honour. The friends vote on which lie to tell the fiancé. The film asks why everybody lies, and the answer is that each lie protects something real: a marriage, a friend, a dead woman’s name, one’s own picture of oneself. It is the first great portrait of the generation born around the revolution. These are people who drink tea in jeans, joke about sex and play charades, and who discover in a crisis that the old law of reputation still runs through them. The film’s public life was entangled with politics from the start. Its lead, Golshifteh Farahani, had appeared in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies without official permission, and her standing with the authorities put the film’s domestic screening in doubt before it was eventually allowed. She left Iran soon after and has worked in exile since. About Elly won Farhadi the Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin in February 2009 and opened in Iran that June. June 2009 was the month of the disputed presidential election and the Green Movement, the largest street protests since the revolution, driven by precisely the class and generation on screen. The film was written and shot before any of it, and it contains no politics in the narrow sense. But it was watched in a country where millions of people had just learned how much depends on who controls the account of what happened. A film about a group that closes ranks around a convenient version of events did not need a topical reference to be understood.
A Separation: the courtroom with no judge
The film opens with a husband and wife facing the camera. They are addressing a family court judge whom we never properly see, which puts the audience on the bench. Simin has obtained visas and wants to emigrate with their eleven-year-old daughter, Termeh. Nader will not go, because his father has Alzheimer’s. The judge asks Simin what is so wrong with raising a child in this country. She does not answer. That silence is the most political moment in Farhadi’s work, and it passed the censors because it is a silence. Emigration was not an abstract theme in 2010. After the crushing of the Green Movement a large part of the educated middle class was leaving or planning to, and Iran’s loss of graduates was already among the heaviest in the world. Simin’s suitcase by the door was a sight in half the flats of north Tehran. When Simin moves out, Nader hires Razieh, a devout woman from the poor southern suburbs, to mind his father. She takes the job without telling her unemployed, indebted husband. On her first day the old man soils himself, and she telephones a religious advice line to ask whether it would be a sin for her to wash him. Days later Nader comes home to find his father tied to the bed and money missing. He pushes Razieh out of the door. She miscarries. Under Iranian law a foetus past a certain age has legal personhood, so Nader faces a homicide charge, and the case turns on a single question of knowledge: did he know she was pregnant? Everything that follows is procedure. An examining magistrate in a cramped office hears both sides at once. Hojjat, Razieh’s husband, rages that men like Nader always win because they know how to talk. Nader, who thinks of himself as an honest man, shades his testimony and lets his daughter see him do it. Termeh then lies to protect him. A settlement in blood money is agreed, and collapses at the last moment because Nader asks Razieh to swear on the Quran that he caused the miscarriage. She cannot, because she has a doubt she has told no one, and she believes a false oath will bring harm on her child. What first looks like a contest between the comfortable and the poor becomes at least six contests at once: secular and devout, husband and wife, employer and servant, parent and child, truth and self-protection, the statute and the conscience. Farhadi’s achievement is that no party is a mouthpiece. The religious woman is the only person in the film who will not lie under oath. The liberal father is the one who teaches his child to deceive a court. Almost everyone has a legitimate interest, and almost everyone does something they should not.
The film and the state
The making of the film is its own Farhadi plot. In autumn 2010, in a speech at an industry ceremony, he expressed the hope that the exiled Mohsen Makhmalbaf and the banned Jafar Panahi would be able to work in Iran again. The culture ministry suspended the production. Shooting resumed only after he issued an apology. That December Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof were each sentenced to six years in prison and a twenty-year ban on filmmaking. The film won the Golden Bear at Berlin in February 2011, with both acting ensembles sharing the Silver Bears. Panahi had been invited to sit on that jury, and the festival kept an empty chair for him. In January 2012 the ministry dissolved the House of Cinema, the independent guild to which most Iranian filmmakers belonged. Days later A Separation won the Golden Globe, and the deputy culture minister congratulated Farhadi as proof of the vitality of cinema under the Islamic Republic. The Oscar came on 26 February 2012, at the height of the nuclear confrontation, with new oil sanctions biting and open talk of an Israeli strike. Farhadi used his minute on stage to speak past both governments. He offered the award to the people of Iran and described them as a people who respect all cultures and despise hostility, at a time, he said, when politicians were exchanging talk of war. State television welcomed the victory, partly because the film had beaten an Israeli nominee. Two weeks later the authorities refused a permit for a ceremony in his honour in Tehran. Farhadi was reported as saying that the best congratulations the ministry could offer would be to reopen the House of Cinema. So within eighteen months the same film was suspended, licensed, attacked by conservatives for showing Iranians who want to leave, claimed by the government as a national triumph, and denied a party. That sequence describes the position Farhadi occupied for the next decade.
Abroad and home again
The Past (2013) was shot in French in a suburb of Paris. Ahmad flies in from Tehran after four years to sign divorce papers for Marie, who wants to marry Samir, whose wife lies in a coma after a suicide attempt. The investigation this time runs backwards: who knew about the affair, who forwarded which emails, and whether the wife knew before she drank the detergent. Bérénice Bejo won Best Actress at Cannes. The film answered a question that hung over A Separation: was the method dependent on Iranian law and Iranian reticence? It was not. Remove the Quran and the magistrate and the structure still stands, because its real material is the gap between what each person knows. But something is lost. In Paris nobody risks prison or ruin, so the stakes are emotional only, and the film is quieter and more airless for it. It is also the first of his films in which the Iranian character is the visitor, the one with a suitcase, a preview of the director’s own position. The Salesman (2016) brought him home in the brief optimism of Hassan Rouhani’s first term and the 2015 nuclear agreement. Emad is a schoolteacher and Rana his wife. Both are acting in a Tehran staging of Death of a Salesman. In the opening scene their building begins to crack because of excavation next door, as good an image as any of a city being torn down and rebuilt on speculation. They move into a flat whose previous tenant, a woman with many male visitors, has left her belongings behind. One evening Rana buzzes the door open thinking it is Emad, and is attacked in the shower. They do not go to the police. Rana cannot face the questions, and both of them know how a woman who opened her door to a stranger would be discussed. So Emad investigates privately, and the film becomes a study of a mild, cultivated man discovering in himself an appetite for humiliating another. When he finds the culprit he is an elderly, ailing street vendor with a family, a Willy Loman, and Emad’s revenge is to threaten him with exposure. The theatre-within-the-film has its own joke about the system: the actress playing Miller’s half-dressed woman must perform the scene in a raincoat and headscarf. The film won Best Screenplay and Best Actor for Shahab Hosseini at Cannes. Abbas Kiarostami died that July, and Farhadi became, by default, the most prominent Iranian filmmaker alive. Then American politics supplied the next act. On 27 January 2017 the new Trump administration barred entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, Iran among them. Taraneh Alidoosti announced she would boycott the Oscars. Farhadi followed, saying he would not attend even if granted an exemption. On 26 February The Salesman won, and the Iranian-American engineer Anousheh Ansari read his statement, which called the ban inhumane and said his absence was out of respect for the people of the seven countries. The same evening the Mayor of London screened the film free in Trafalgar Square. A director accused at home of flattering the West had turned down its most coveted stage, and for a few weeks both Tehran and Hollywood claimed him. Everybody Knows (2018) opened Cannes, in Spanish, with Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Ricardo Darín. A woman returns from Argentina to her Castilian village for a wedding and her teenage daughter is abducted during the party. The kidnapping drags up an old love affair, a vineyard sold cheaply, and a question of paternity that the whole village has quietly understood for sixteen years. The title names his enduring subject, the open secret, but the thriller plot is conventional and the film is his weakest. It appeared the same month the United States withdrew from the nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions, which closed the short window in which The Salesman had been made.
A Hero and the end of the middle position
A Hero (2021) was shot in Shiraz. Rahim is in prison for a debt owed to his former brother-in-law, since under Iranian law a creditor can have a defaulting debtor jailed until he pays. On a two-day leave his girlfriend shows him a handbag she has found containing gold coins. They consider selling them. The price of gold has dipped and the sum would not clear the debt, so Rahim finds the owner and gives the bag back. The prison administration, embarrassed by a recent inmate suicide, puts him on television. A charity raises money for him. Then the story is checked. He cannot produce the woman who claimed the coins. He has told a small lie to keep his girlfriend out of it, in a society where an unmarried couple cannot be publicly acknowledged. A video of him losing his temper circulates. The creditor, who is usually cast as the villain in such stories, turns out to have lost his daughter’s dowry to Rahim’s default and asks, reasonably, why a man should be celebrated for not stealing. It is his most direct film about institutions. The prison, the charity and the television station each need a hero for reasons of their own, and each drops him when he becomes a liability. It is also his film about social media, where a reputation is made and unmade by strangers in an afternoon. It shared the Grand Prix at Cannes.
The break
By 2021 the ground had shifted under the position Farhadi had held for a decade. Protests over prices in the winter of 2017-18 and over fuel in November 2019 had been put down with live fire. In January 2020 the Revolutionary Guard shot down a Ukrainian airliner and denied it for three days. In June 2021 Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline judge, took the presidency in a managed election. The room for a licensed artist who was neither with the state nor against it was closing. That November the head of a Guard-linked film foundation remarked that Farhadi pleased both the government and its opponents. Farhadi answered on Instagram with a fury unlike anything he had said before. He wrote that he had never felt any affinity with the authorities’ thinking, cited the killing of protesters and discrimination against women, and revealed that his passport had repeatedly been taken at Tehran airport for questioning. If Iran’s submission of A Hero for the Oscar meant he was in the government’s debt, he said, they were welcome to withdraw it.
The plagiarism case
Then a dispute arose that might have been drafted by Farhadi himself. Azadeh Masihzadeh, a former student, said that A Hero was taken from All Winners, All Losers, a documentary she made in a workshop he ran in Tehran in 2014, about a real prisoner who returned found money. Farhadi said the case had been reported in the press and belonged to no one. He sued her for defamation. She sued him for plagiarism. In spring 2022 an investigating magistrate dismissed his suit and found grounds for hers, which was widely reported abroad as a conviction. In March 2024 the court cleared him, relying on expert opinions that the story was in the public domain. The legal question is closed and the moral one is not. Masihzadeh has said she signed a paper disclaiming the idea under pressure from a famous teacher. Some critics continue to hold it against him, and a hostile review of his 2026 film treated the acquittal as beside the point. A film about a man whose good name is destroyed by a dispute over who told the truth first produced a dispute over who told the story first, between a powerful man and a young woman, in an Iranian court. The viewer of A Hero is trained to distrust every confident account of such a case, including the one that favours the director.
Woman, Life, Freedom
Mahsa Jina Amini died in the custody of the morality police on 16 September 2022. Farhadi was at the Zurich Film Festival and recorded an appeal asking artists everywhere to stand with the protesters. In December Taraneh Alidoosti, the face of four of his films, was arrested after posting a photograph of herself without a headscarf, and he campaigned publicly for her release. He told Variety in 2023 that he had heard unofficially that he was banned from working in Iran. Then he drew the line that separates his career into two parts. He told Le Monde that he would not make another film in Iran as long as he was obliged to cover his actresses’ hair. This is an aesthetic statement as much as a political one. Iranian screen rules require women to be veiled even in scenes set at home, among family, in bed. Farhadi’s whole art is domestic realism, and for twenty years it rested on an image every Iranian viewer knew to be false. Once women in the street had stopped pretending, the director of A Separation could not ask his actresses to go on pretending in the kitchen.
Parallel Tales and 2026
Five years passed before the tenth film. Parallel Tales (2026) was shot in Paris in autumn 2025, in French, written with his brother Saeed and cast from the top of French cinema: Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney, Adam Bessa, Catherine Deneuve. It is a free adaptation of the sixth episode of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog, the one about a watcher at a window. Huppert plays Sylvie, a novelist short of material who begins observing the neighbours across the street and writing them into a book, until the invented story starts to act on the real people. The choice of Kieślowski is a declaration of lineage. The Dekalog was made in Poland in 1988, in the last grey years of a regime that still licensed its artists, and it took ten commandments and tested each against one housing block. That is as close to a description of Farhadi’s project as another filmmaker has come. The change of subject is also telling. For the first time his central figure is not someone trapped in a story but someone manufacturing one. After the plagiarism case, a film about a writer who takes other people’s lives for material is hard to watch without thinking of its director. It premiered in competition at Cannes on 14 May 2026 to an ovation and mixed reviews, with praise for the cast and complaints about length and contrivance. The jury under Park Chan-wook gave it nothing. I have not seen it and offer no verdict. The press conference mattered more than the reception. In January 2026 Iran saw the largest protests in the history of the Islamic Republic, and they were put down with a death toll the government itself placed in the thousands. On 28 February the United States and Israel went to war with Iran. A ceasefire took hold on 8 April and was still described as fragile in May. Farhadi, who has lived mostly abroad since 2023, had been in Tehran the week before the festival. Asked about it, he refused the choice that both sides wanted him to make. He spoke of two tragedies, the civilians and children killed in the bombing and the protesters killed before it, and said that grief for one did not cancel grief for the other. “Every murder is a crime,” he said, whether by war, execution or the shooting of demonstrators. Supporters heard moral consistency. Critics on both sides heard evasion, the old habit of the man who will not name a villain. Either way it was the statement his films would predict. The director who built a career on denying the audience a single guilty party declined to supply one for his own country at the worst moment of its modern history.
The films against the calendar
Set side by side, the films track the political weather closely, though none of them mentions it. Year
| Year | Film | Setting / language | The engine of the plot | Iran at that moment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dancing in the Dust | Tehran and the desert, Persian | Mahr, the marriage debt | Late Khatami; reform stalling | 2004 |
| Beautiful City | Tehran, Persian | Qisas and blood money | Conservatives retake parliament | 2006 |
| Fireworks Wednesday | Tehran, Persian | Marriage and domestic labour | First year of Ahmadinejad | 2009 |
| About Elly | Caspian coast, Persian | Honour and engagement | Disputed election, Green Movement | 2011 |
| A Separation | Tehran, Persian | Family court, the oath, emigration | Post-2009 repression, sanctions, Panahi sentenced | 2013 |
| The Past | Paris, French | Divorce, with no law to hide behind | Rouhani elected | 2016 |
| The Salesman | Tehran, Persian | Honour, private revenge, stage censorship | Nuclear deal; then the US travel ban | 2018 |
| Everybody Knows | Castile, Spanish | Land, paternity, village memory | US leaves the nuclear deal | 2021 |
| A Hero | Shiraz, Persian | Debtors’ prison, charity, television | After November 2019; Raisi takes office | 2026 |
| Parallel Tales | Paris, French | Authorship and surveillance | January massacres; war with the US and Israel | Two patterns stand out. Every Iranian film hangs on a rule that converts a private relationship into a legal or financial claim. And the films made abroad lose exactly that, which is why they are the weaker half of the work. |
The case against Farhadi
The case is strongest when the objections are stated first, because they come from serious people and from opposite directions. The charge from the opposition is that he was the Islamic Republic’s presentable face. He worked with permits for two decades. He apologised in 2010 to get his cameras back. His films were submitted to the Academy by a state body five times. While Panahi was filming in secret under a twenty-year ban and Rasoulof was going to prison, Farhadi was collecting prizes with films whose scripts had been approved by the ministry. Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Panahi’s collaborator on This Is Not a Film, put it with precision: Farhadi was very clever at giving the censors no excuse, while he and Panahi were looking for a third way. On this view the famous ambiguity is not an ethic but a survival technique, and the refusal to name a villain is convenient in a country where the villain has an address. The charge from the regime’s side is the mirror image. Conservative critics have accused him for fifteen years of siah-namayi, painting Iran black for foreign juries: liars, divorces, women who want to leave, men who cannot protect their wives. In this reading the Oscars are a reward for showing the West what it wishes to see. The charge from the critics is aesthetic. The scripts are too tidy. Each film withholds one piece of information by authorial fiat, and the drama depends on characters failing to say the obvious sentence. Once you know the trick, the argument runs, the films replay it with diminishing returns, and the European productions show how thin it becomes without Iranian pressure behind it. And there is the charge from A Hero’s shadow, that a director whose subject is the abuse of standing did not always handle his own with care.
What the objections get right, and wrong
The comparison with Panahi and Rasoulof is fair and it does not flatter him. Panahi answered his ban with This Is Not a Film, Taxi and No Bears, and in 2025 won the Palme d’Or for It Was Just an Accident, a film about former prisoners who think they have caught their torturer. Rasoulof made There Is No Evil, four stories about the men who carry out executions, and shot The Seed of the Sacred Fig in secret before escaping across the mountains in 2024. These are acts of courage that Farhadi did not perform. Younger directors paid as well: Saeed Roustayi was sentenced for showing Leila’s Brothers at Cannes without permission, and the makers of My Favourite Cake were prosecuted for filming an actress without a headscarf. But the charge of complicity mistakes what the licensed films did. A Separation was seen in Iranian cinemas by millions of Iranians. Panahi’s films after 2010 were seen in Iran on smuggled discs and abroad at festivals. A society needs both the work that is thrown over the wall and the work that is argued about in the lobby afterwards, and for a decade Farhadi was the only filmmaker of the first rank doing the second. What he showed that audience, with the censor’s stamp on it, was a judge who cannot answer a woman’s question, a law that prices a daughter at half a son, and a prison that manufactures virtue for television. It is also worth noticing that Panahi and Rasoulof have converged on his form. It Was Just an Accident is a moral thriller about a group of ordinary people who cannot be certain they have the right man and must decide what to do with him. There Is No Evil distributes responsibility for state killing across conscripts and their families. Both are Farhadi structures with the state put back in the frame. The dissidents took his method and removed its limit. The aesthetic criticism has more force as the career goes on. The method is a machine, and a machine can run without anything at stake. The answer to it is the three films where the machine is loaded with real weight: About Elly, A Separation and The Salesman. And on the last charge I do not think an essay can rule. He was cleared by a court whose independence nobody praises, in a case where the other party had far less power. That sentence can be read in his favour or against him, which is how his own films would leave it.
His contemporaries: a school without a name
The usual way to honour Farhadi is to seat him beside Bergman, Kurosawa and Tarkovsky. It is more useful to seat him beside the people he actually competes with. Between roughly 2005 and 2025 a group of directors born in the 1960s and early 1970s, working in different countries with no shared manifesto, arrived at the same kind of film. It is small in scale and realist in manner. It starts from one incident. It follows the incident through family, workplace and bureaucracy, and it ends without a verdict. I would call it the cinema of moral procedure, and Farhadi is its clearest case. Its sources are easy to name. Kurosawa’s Rashomon supplied the idea that testimony is interest. Kieślowski’s Dekalog supplied the method of testing a commandment against a housing block. The Dardenne brothers, from La Promesse onward, supplied the handheld camera at the shoulder of a person facing a decision. Michael Haneke’s Caché supplied the mystery that is never solved because guilt is the real subject. What the generation after them added was the institution: the court, the clinic, the school board, the prosecutor’s office, shown patiently and from inside. Director
| Director | Country · born | The Farhadi-adjacent films | What they share | Where they part |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Romania, 1968 | 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; Graduation; R.M.N.; Fjord | Decent people bargaining with a corrupt system; the favour as moral currency | Long unbroken takes; the camera watches where Farhadi’s cuts and hides | Andrey Zvyagintsev |
| Russia, 1964 | Elena; Leviathan; Loveless; Minotaur | The broken marriage as the state in miniature; class as fate | Monumental, cold, openly allegorical; he does judge | Nuri Bilge Ceylan |
| Turkey, 1959 | Once Upon a Time in Anatolia; Winter Sleep; About Dry Grasses | Chekhov; the educated man’s self-deception; talk as action | Landscape and duration; plot barely matters | Hirokazu Kore-eda |
| Japan, 1962 | Like Father, Like Son; The Third Murder; Shoplifters; Monster | Family as a legal fiction; truth changing with the teller | Tenderness; he forgives his characters before the film begins | Ryusuke Hamaguchi |
| Japan, 1978 | Happy Hour; Drive My Car; Evil Does Not Exist | A classic play rehearsed inside the film; confession through performance | Time and ritual instead of suspense | Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne |
| Belgium, 1951 and 1954 | The Son; The Child; Two Days, One Night | One person, one decision, a clock running | A single consciousness; Farhadi distributes the film across six | Michael Haneke |
| Austria, 1942 | Caché; The White Ribbon; Amour | The withheld answer; bourgeois guilt | Haneke indicts the viewer; Farhadi deputises the viewer | Lee Chang-dong |
| South Korea, 1954 | Secret Sunshine; Poetry; Burning | The disappearance that is never explained; class resentment | Novelistic and metaphysical | Justine Triet |
| France, 1978 | Anatomy of a Fall | A marriage tried in court; the child as deciding witness | The courtroom is literal and the genre is embraced | Ruben Östlund |
| Sweden, 1974 | Force Majeure | One instinctive act that dissolves a family’s idea of itself | Satire; he holds his people in contempt | Mungiu, the nearest neighbour |
Mungiu is the closest parallel, and the comparison explains both men. Each grew up under a state that regulated private life in detail, Ceaușescu’s Romania and Khomeini’s Iran. Each makes films in which the system is not a villain in an office but a medium everyone swims in. Graduation, from the same year as The Salesman, could be exchanged for it: a respectable doctor’s daughter is assaulted on the eve of an exam, and the father, who has taught her honesty, starts trading favours to fix her result. It is the same story of a principled man corrupted by a wrong done to a woman in his care. The difference is formal and it has political meaning. Mungiu holds a scene in one long take and lets you watch the bargain being struck. Farhadi cuts away at the decisive second, the push on the stairs, the attack in the shower, and builds the film out of the absence. Mungiu’s people know what they did and negotiate over it. Farhadi’s do not know, and neither do we. It suited the moment that when Parallel Tales went unrewarded at Cannes in 2026, the Palme d’Or went to Mungiu for Fjord, about a Romanian family whose children are removed by Norwegian child services, and the Grand Prix to Zvyagintsev for Minotaur, a marriage thriller set against Russia’s war. The school took the top two prizes on the night its most decorated member was passed over.
Zvyagintsev, the other authoritarian case
Zvyagintsev is the instructive contrast, because his situation is nearest to Farhadi’s and his choice was the opposite. Leviathan was made with Russian state money and then denounced by the culture minister. Loveless is a divorce film, like A Separation, in which the child disappears, and it leaves no doubt that the parents and the country are being condemned together. He names the villain. He left Russia, nearly died of illness, and returned to filmmaking in exile. Farhadi’s refusal to do the same is where admiration and objection meet. Zvyagintsev’s films are grander and more damning. Farhadi’s are harder to dismiss, because a viewer who recognises himself in Nader cannot wave the film away as an attack by an enemy.
Kore-eda and Hamaguchi
The Japanese pair show the method without the pressure of an authoritarian state. Kore-eda’s Monster retells one school incident three times, from the mother’s, the teacher’s and the children’s positions, and each telling overturns the last. That is Farhadi’s structure made explicit. But Kore-eda’s cinema is consoling. His makeshift families are warmer than the legal ones, and the films side with them. Farhadi offers no shelter. His families are where the damage is done. Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car stages Uncle Vanya inside a story of grief, exactly as The Salesman stages Miller inside a story of shame. Both directors trained on the idea that people say in rehearsal what they cannot say at home. Where Hamaguchi lets a conversation run for twenty minutes until the truth comes up by itself, Farhadi interrupts, with a doorbell, a phone, a child entering. His characters are never allowed to finish a sentence that would settle things.
Inside Iran
At home his contemporaries and heirs divide along the line already described. Rakhshan Banietemad’s Under the Skin of the City and Mehrjui’s Leila and Hamoun were the social and marital dramas he built on, and Mehrjui’s murder in 2023 closed that chapter. Panahi and Rasoulof took the road of open defiance. The younger realists who learned the most from him are Saeed Roustayi, whose Leila’s Brothers is a Farhadi family with the economics turned up to a shout, and the directors of the so-called underground wave, Ali Asgari, Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, who shoot unveiled women without a permit and accept the consequences. Their existence is the strongest evidence of his influence and the sharpest comment on his caution.
Against Hollywood
The American mainstream wants motive to be legible: something happens because someone wanted it. Farhadi’s plots work by collision. One person wants something reasonable, another wants something equally reasonable, and their actions meet in a stairwell. This is closer to Greek tragedy, where two legitimate claims destroy a house, than to the screenwriting manual. The films cost very little, and Hollywood has paid him the tribute of two Oscars and no successful imitation.
Where he stands
The deepest way to describe him is as a filmmaker of distributed responsibility. Something happens. Someone reacts. The reaction causes something else, and at the end there is a catastrophe for which nobody can be singled out. The tragedy in A Separation is produced by class, family, law, money, gender, religion, pride, fear and missing information acting together. It is close to a systems theory of ethics, and it is much nearer to how societies fail than the story of one bad man. The pairing with Kiarostami clarifies what is new. Kiarostami asks what reality is, and dissolves the line between the event and its filming. Farhadi asks what happened, builds an event of great solidity, and then shows that no participant can see all of it. Kiarostami’s uncertainty is philosophical. Farhadi’s is forensic. One made Iranian cinema a place where the world went to think about images. The other made it a place where the world went to think about blame. The method has a limit, and 2026 found it. Distributed responsibility is the truth about a miscarriage on a staircase. It is not the whole truth about a state that fires on crowds, or about an air campaign against a city. There are events with authors. A cinema built to deny the audience a culprit is at its best in the apartment and the magistrate’s office, and it has little to say when the culprit signs the order. Panahi and Rasoulof made their strongest films by taking Farhadi’s form into the places where it must break. He has not followed them, and the move to Paris and Kieślowski suggests he does not intend to. Ranking directors is a parlour game, but the question was asked, so here is an answer. Among filmmakers who emerged after 2000, I would put him in the first rank on the strength of three films, with A Separation among the handful of this century’s works that will be taught for as long as films are taught. He sits below the directors of his generation who have kept renewing their form, Ceylan and Hamaguchi among them. He sits above nearly everyone in the one skill he has made his own, which is the construction of a moral problem that survives every viewing. The usual lineage, Kurosawa to Bergman to Kiarostami to Farhadi, flatters more than it explains. The line I would draw runs through the theatre: Ibsen, Chekhov, Miller, then Kieślowski, then Farhadi. It is the tradition of the room in which respectable people discover what they are prepared to do. His greatest achievement is that he turned the ordinary moral life of the Iranian middle class into a form the whole world could read. An American watches A Separation and thinks of America. A French viewer sees France. Iranians saw themselves, in a cinema in Tehran, with the censor’s permit on the print, at a time when almost no other mirror was allowed. The films said nothing against the Islamic Republic, and they left an exact record of what it is like to live under it. Where to start
- 1 About Elly for the machinery, in its purest form.
- 2 A Separation for the masterpiece. Watch it twice; the second viewing is a different film.
- 3 The Salesman for dignity, masculinity and revenge.
- 4 A Hero for reputation, institutions and public virtue.
- 5 Beautiful City for the law of blood money stated plainly. It is the most underrated.
- 6 Fireworks Wednesday to see where the mature style came from.
- 7 The Past and Everybody Knows for the method in exile.
- Then watch Mungiu’s Graduation beside The Salesman, Zvyagintsev’s Loveless beside A Separation, and Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident beside A Hero. The pairings do more than any essay to show what Farhadi chose and what he declined.
Sources The film descriptions follow the standard record. The following were consulted for the political and recent history; quotations are short and attributed in the text. • Production suspension and apology, 2010: The Globe and Mail; Tablet, which also carries the Mirtahmasb remark • Golden Globe reaction and House of Cinema closure, January 2012: AFP via Hürriyet Daily News • Cancelled Tehran ceremony, March 2012: AP via CBC; RFE/RL • Instagram statement, November 2021: Iran International; AFP via The New Arab • Plagiarism case: TheWrap on the 2022 ruling; RFE/RL on the 2024 acquittal • After Mahsa Amini: Variety interview, 2023; Iran International on the Le Monde interview • Parallel Tales: production details; Cannes reception; Little White Lies review • Cannes press conference, 15 May 2026: AFP via Al-Monitor; Reuters • Cannes 2026 awards: TheWrap • Prosecution of the My Favourite Cake directors: Deadline via Yahoo
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