Iranian Oscar winner adjusts to cultural go-between role in Hollywood
Filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, known for A Separation and with his latest film The Salesman also up for Academy Award, says he writes from the heart about aspects of Tehran foreigners rarely see, but doesn’t target audiences overseas
Asghar Farhadi stepped out into the biting winter Tehran air clutching his Oscar, taken aback by the huge crowd waiting at the airport to crown him Iran’s next national hero.
Cinema in the Islamic republic had been winning critical plaudits for decades but had failed to break into the mainstream until the celebrated auteur brought home the country’s first Academy Awards in 2012.
“I tried to go surreptitiously, precisely to avoid any kind of scene, and somehow they had managed to glean what day I was arriving and there were crowds at the airport,” Farhadi remembers. “The numbers were so huge that I began to be concerned about crowd control.”
It came as huge morale boost to many Iranians whose lives were overshadowed by civil unrest following the “Arab spring” uprisings in nearby Egypt and Tunisia, the ever-present threat of conflict and crippling economic sanctions.