A Masterclass with Asghar Farhadi, one of the most significant Iranian and international filmmakers of the 21st century, was held at the Bosnian Cultural Centre in Sarajevo. Moderated by British film critic Neil Young, the conversation explored Farhadi’s childhood, his first encounters with cinema, storytelling, the responsibility of the filmmaker, and his belief that cinema should never offer simple answers to complex human questions.
Today a two-time Academy Award winner, Farhadi gained international recognition through films that uncover profound moral and social dilemmas within seemingly ordinary lives. He won the Oscar® for Best Foreign Language Film for A Separation, making it the first Iranian film to receive the award. He won his second Oscar® for The Salesman. His body of work also includes About Elly, The Past, Everybody Knows and A Hero, which earned him the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.
His relationship with cinema began in his childhood, in a small Iranian town where cinemas were far away and going to the movies was almost a small adventure.
“I think we all carry some kind of emotional bank within us. From the time we are children, we begin collecting experiences, images, feelings, encounters, and stories that we later 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 this was my first film education,” Farhadi said.
He made his first short film at the age of 13, and a special place in his memory is his grandfather, whom he regarded as a hero.
“My grandfather was my hero. Whenever he came to visit, he could turn everything into a story. I carry his name and, in a way, I feel that the two of us are connected through storytelling. Storytelling became my way of expressing myself.”
His first encounter with cinema was, paradoxically, an incomplete one. Since there was no cinema in his town, he and his friends would secretly take a bus to a neighbouring town. The bus, however, was almost always late, meaning they would arrive just before the end of the screening.
“I was about seven years old, and I would only see 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 it, your imagination starts working. I started creating my own films. Today I think that experience taught me not to simply accept a story as it is presented to me.”
In the years following the Iranian Revolution, when access to foreign films was limited, television became his window into world cinema. At the beginning of his professional career, he wrote a radio play primarily because he needed money. That assignment opened the door to television and changed the course of his life. He moved from writing for radio to television scripts and eventually to filmmaking.
For Farhadi, however, artistic development is inseparable from curiosity about the world. This is precisely why his films rarely offer definitive judgments. He wants the audience to make its own assessment of the characters and their actions.
“Life is not linear; it is layered. Everything that happens to us remains somewhere inside us and later returns through what we create. In classical cinema, the filmmaker often takes responsibility for telling the audience who is good and who is bad. In contemporary cinema, I want the audience to take that responsibility. I do not want to tell them what to think; I just want to give them enough reasons to reach their own conclusions,” said the director.
This approach is particularly evident in A Separation, which was screened at this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival as a gala screening. The film begins as a story of a marriage in crisis before expanding into a complex drama about class, responsibility, faith, parenthood and truth.
Farhadi also spoke about working with children, acknowledging that it is among the most demanding aspects of filmmaking, yet children in his films serve a particular dramatic purpose.
“They bring an emotional dimension to the story. Children are also observers; they watch everything that is happening, and precisely because of that, they intensify the drama.”
At the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival, Farhadi returned to a festival he had first visited in 2018, when he served as President of the Jury of the Competition Programme – Feature Film.
In recognition of his outstanding contribution to the art of cinema, Asghar Farhadi was presented with the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo. The award was presented by Sarajevo Film Festival Director Jovan Marjanović, giving Farhadi’s return to Sarajevo a fitting final note; a tribute to an auteur whose films have spent decades refusing to tell audiences what to think, instead teaching them how to look more closely.
