As the world is set to converge on Cannes again this year for the 71st Cannes International Film Festival, iconic Iranian filmmaker, Asghar Farhadi, is in the spotlight again for another feat that will surely be the talk of town.
Farhadi who in 2012 was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world is one of the filmmakers described in my previous articles as bagging the glory of their passion for film activism in exile.
As a film director and screenwriter, he has, among others, bagged a Golden Globe Award as well as two Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film for his films A Separation (2012) and The Salesman (2017), making him one of the few directors world-wide who have won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film twice, along with such noted directors as Akira Kurosawa and René Clément.
Now, Cannes has announced that his latest film, ‘Everybody Knows’ (Todos Lo Saben), will open the Competition of the 71st Festival de Cannes at the Grand Théâtre Lumière in the Palais des Festivals on Tuesday, May 8.
‘Everybody Knows’ is Farhadi’s 8th feature film, shot entirely in Spanish on the Iberian Peninsula. It charts the story of Laura, who lives with her husband and children in Buenos Aires. When they return together to her native village in Spain for a family celebration, an unexpected event changes the course of their lives. The family, its ties and the moral choices imposed on them lie, as in every one of Farhadi’s scripts, at the heart of the plot.
This highly innovative filmmaker continues to pull stunts, as Cannes records that the last time the opening film was neither in English nor in French was for Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Bad Education’ in 2004.
Over the past decade, Farhadi has established himself as one of Iran’s most influential and internationally recognised filmmakers, both for his tense and carefully crafted scripts and for the virtuosity of his realism in directing. At the Berlinale, A Separation (2011) garnered the Golden Bear, as well as the Golden Globe, César and Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Farhadi then entered the official selection at Cannes with The Past (2013, Best Actress for Bérénice Bejo) and The Salesman (2016, Best Screenplay and Best Actor for Shahab Hosseini), which also won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
A psychological thriller, ‘Everybody Knows’ stars Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem from Spain and Ricardo Darín from Argentina. As usual, Asghar Farhadi also surrounds himself with a first-class team: José Luis Alcaine on photography (a regular collaborator of Pedro Almodóvar, Carlos Saura and Bigas Luna), the costume designer Sonia Grande (Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen, The Others by Alejandro Amenábar), and Iranian editor Hayedeh Safiyari, continuing a long and fruitful collaboration with the director after working together on four of his feature films, including his two Oscar-winning films.
Recall that in 2016, Farhadi was awarded with the Best Screenplay prize for the film “The Salesman (Forushande) during the closing ceremony of the 69th Cannes Film Festival. And in January 2017, the Oscar-winning director said he was not attending that year’s Academy Awards, comparing President Donald Trump’s visa ban on seven Muslim countries to the actions of hardliners in his own country. Farhadi, nominated for Best Foreign Language Film for “The Salesman”, said in a statement carried by Iranian news agencies that he had initially planned to attend the ceremony in Los Angeles, but had been forced to change his mind.
This followed Trump’s signing of an executive order prohibiting entry to the United States to all nationals of seven Muslim-majority states — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
“I neither had the intention to not attend nor did I want to boycott the event as a show of objection, for I know that many in the American film industry and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are opposed to the fanaticism and extremism which are today taking place more than ever,” Farhadi said.
“However, it now seems that the possibility of this presence is being accompanied by ifs and buts which are in no way acceptable to me even if exceptions were to be made for my trip.” He said hardliners in United States and Iran acted with the same mentality.
“For years on both sides of the ocean, groups of hardliners have tried to present to their people unrealistic and fearful images of various nations and cultures in order to turn their differences into disagreements, their disagreements into enmities and their enmities into fears,” he said, adding that “Instilling fear in the people is an important tool used to justify extremist and fanatic behaviour by narrow-minded individuals.”
There is no doubt that this radical filmmaker will make news again, coming to Cannes with a new film.
The 71st Festival de Cannes will be held from Tuesday, May 8 to Saturday, May 19. The competition jury will be chaired by Cate Blanchett. The composition of the official selection will be announced on Thursday, April 12, 2018.