The director who established Iranian cinema's contemporary international presence. Two Best Foreign Language Film Oscars, both for films built around the same structural device: moral ambiguity that the audience must adjudicate.
Asghar Farhadi has, since 2003, directed nine feature films. Two of them — A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016) — won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, a pairing that very few non-English directors of any era have achieved. His commercial reach is significantly smaller than directors at comparable critical standing; his films typically gross under $30m worldwide. The critical reception across his filmography has been consistent and significant.
Farhadi's films share a structural device that is, in working-screenwriter circles, sometimes simply called 'the Farhadi structure.' Each film opens with a relatively conventional dramatic setup; an incident occurs whose specific circumstances are partially withheld from the audience; the film then tracks the consequences of the incident as different characters' competing accounts of what happened progressively complicate the audience's understanding. The audience is, in some sense, asked to function as a juror across the film's runtime — adjudicating which version of events is closest to true.
The technique is at its purest in A Separation. The opening sequence is a divorce hearing; the central incident is the loss of a pregnancy that may or may not have been caused by a domestic shove between the husband and the housekeeper; the film tracks the legal and personal consequences of competing accounts. The audience is never definitively told what happened. The film closes on the daughter being asked to choose which parent to live with — and the camera cuts to black before her answer. The structural decision is the film's argument.
Farhadi's films consistently withhold information that conventional cinema would deliver. The cause of a death. The motivation for a betrayal. The actual events of a contested moment. The audience is given partial accounts from multiple characters whose perspectives are incomplete and whose interests may conflict. The films do not, as a rule, resolve the ambiguity at the conclusion.
This is the film's specific moral argument. Farhadi has spoken across multiple interviews about the technique as a deliberate refusal of the conventional dramatic narrative's tendency to flatten moral complexity into binary judgments. The films argue that real moral situations are, structurally, indeterminate from the inside; the participants disagree about what actually happened; the truth, if there is one, is not accessible to any single perspective. The technique forces the audience to inhabit the genuine uncertainty that the characters inhabit, rather than to receive the conventional dramatic clarity that cinema usually provides.
Farhadi's films are typically set in contemporary urban Iranian middle-class settings — apartments in Tehran, professional households, families with university-educated parents and school-age children. The setting is significant because most international cinema's Iran is, in foreign audiences' imagination, either the rural-poverty Iran of Abbas Kiarostami's earlier films or the political-spectacle Iran of news reporting. Farhadi's Iran is neither. His Iran is recognisably contemporary urban middle-class — and, in some sense, more challenging for foreign audiences precisely because it is so familiar in its texture while operating under social and legal constraints that foreign audiences may not fully understand.
The Iranian legal and social context is structurally important to the films. A Separation's central plot mechanics depend on Iranian legal procedure (the role of judges, the framework of divorce proceedings). The Salesman's central plot depends on Iranian social norms (the impossibility of certain conversations about sexual assault). Farhadi's films are, in some sense, ethnographic works that the foreign audience must work to read accurately.
Farhadi has also worked outside Iran. The Past (2013) was shot in France in French. Everybody Knows (2018) was shot in Spain in Spanish. The films have been less commercially successful and less critically acclaimed than his Iranian-set work. The structural device — withheld information that the audience must adjudicate — is preserved across all his films; what changes is the specific cultural texture.
Farhadi has acknowledged that the Iranian-set films benefit from his deep knowledge of the specific social, legal, and emotional environment they depict. The European films are, in some sense, the same technique applied to material the director understands less intimately. The critical reception has reflected this.
If you've never watched a Farhadi film:
The Iranian New Wave (particularly Abbas Kiarostami, whose work Farhadi has cited as foundational), Italian neorealism, Bergman, and the structural-realism tradition of post-1960s European art cinema.