Iranian director Asghar Farhadi is a man of many accolades, including two Oscars and a Golden Bear, but the filmmaker has also managed one thing very few others have: achieving great box-office success both domestically and internationally. “A Separation,” Iran’s first-ever Oscar-winning film, earned $25 million worldwide, while “The Salesman” earned $4.3 million in Iran, putting the director among the most commercially successful in his home country.
Farhadi, who is at the Sarajevo Film Festival as the recipient of an honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award as well as the subject of a career retrospective, was asked about how he has managed to pull off such a feat. His answer spoke to the current political climate: “We see [Yasujirō] Ozu films from Japan, and we feel all emotions, but we don’t have any information about their culture. [Akira] Kurosawa, Ozu… We can understand that, because all these films are based on humanity. We forgot [about it] today because the media highlights that we are all different, and all news [is] about differences.”
“They don’t say [how] moms everywhere have the same emotions towards their kid, but the way they express it is different,” he went on. “The taste of that love is the same. Love, the base for drama, is the same everywhere. People are very close to each other in the world, but they divide it, the media. When something happens, there’s this push by some politicians to [highlight] the differences.”
