In recognition of his contribution to the art of cinema, Asghar Farhadi received at the National Theatre of the Bosnian capital the honorary Heart of Sarajevo award. In these days, the audience of the Sarajevo Film Festival has the opportunity to get to know his cinema more deeply through a retrospective of the Iranian director’s work, including his latest film, Parallel Stories, which was presented in competition at Cannes. What better setting than a city with a rich and magnificent history, yet also with a painful recent past, to talk about his country at war and the contradictions that continue to tear the world apart in these years.
During a masterclass, Farhadi spoke about his childhood and his first encounters with cinema and the art of storytelling, but also about the responsibility of the filmmaker and his belief that cinema should never offer easy answers to complex human questions.
A two-time Oscar winner, the filmmaker has earned international recognition thanks to films that have laid bare deep moral and social dilemmas within the context of seemingly ordinary lives. He won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for A Separation, the first Iranian film to receive the prize, and for The Client.
“I believe that all of us carry within us some sort of emotional reserve,” he said. “From childhood, we begin to collect experiences, images, feelings, encounters and stories that we carry with us, often without even realizing it. Every summer I spent time with my father, observing the people around me. Today I understand that that was my first cinematic education. I made his first short film at the age of 13. My grandfather was my hero. Every time he came to visit us, he could turn anything into a story. I carry his name, and in a sense, I feel that he and I are bound through the love of storytelling. Telling stories has become my way of expressing myself.”
There was no cinema in his city. Together with his friends, he used to secretly take the bus, always running late, to reach a nearby city. That meant they often arrived only for the end of the screening. “I was about seven years old and I only saw the endings of films. It was strange, but it had a huge impact on me. When you see the ending without knowing what happened before, your imagination starts to work. I began to create my own films. Today I think that experience taught me not to simply accept a story as it is handed to me.”
In the years following the Iranian Revolution, when access to foreign films became limited, television became his window to the world. At the start of his career he wrote a radio drama because he needed money. That assignment changed the course of his life. He moved from radio writing to television screenplays and finally to directing. His artistic development was tied to his curiosity about the reality around him. “Life is not linear, but layered,” he added. “Everything that happens to us stays somewhere inside us and later resurfaces through what we create. In classic cinema, it was the director who took on the responsibility of telling the audience who is good and who is bad. In my idea of cinema, it must be the audience who assumes that responsibility. I do not want to tell them what to think, but only provide them with enough reasons to reach their own conclusions.”
He then accused politicians and the media of stressing only the differences between peoples. “We watch Ozu’s films from Japan and we feel emotions, even if we do not share his culture. We are able to understand them because all these films are based on humanity. Today we have forgotten that because the media stress that we are all different, and all the news concentrates on differences. Love, which lies at the heart of the drama, is the same everywhere. People around the world are very close to one another, but the media keep them apart. When something happens, there is this push from some politicians to emphasize differences. If in Afghanistan a bomb explodes that kills ten children, the first thing that comes to mind is how the children are somewhat different, but do we not think that the love of an Afghan mother for her own children is different from that of our mothers? If only the people who hate each other would sit in the same room and get to know each other, everything would be for the better. We feel different because we do not know each other. It all boils down to this.”
At the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival, Farhadi returned to a festival he had first visited in 2018, when he served as the jury president of the competition.
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