Tehran, Washington, Cannes: Two Irans and a Very Strange Hour

The evening of May 8 was a special one for Iranians. At around 10:30pm Tehran time, one powerful man stood on a platform and spoke. The words, which many Iranians eagerly listened to, determined a key moment in Iranian history. 

It would be easy to assume that I am talking about Donald Trump’s announcement to quit the Iran Deal, but I am not. It is something of a bizarre fact — appreciated by the always-poetic Iranians — that just when eyes around the world were set on the White House, waiting to hear Trump deliver the final blow to the deal, another key moment in Iranian history was being made on the other side of the Atlantic, in the city of Cannes. It was here that Thierry Fermaux, Cannes Film Festival’s director and thus one of the most powerful men in the industry, joined other world dignitaries attending the 71st festival to applaud an Iranian. 

As with every year around this time, thousands flocked to the French Riviera for the opening of the film festival, known to be the greatest feast of modern film in the world. The Cannes’ red carpet was all shine and glamor, and its guests of honor were two of the most familiar faces in world cinema, Spanish actors Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Next to them stood a 46-year-old hailing from the small city of Khomeyni Shahr in central Iran. Asghar Farhadi, whose film Everybody Knows starring Cruz And Bardem opened the film film festival this year, has won many great cinematic accolades: Two Academy Awards (plus another nomination), a silver and a golden bear from the Berlin Film Festival; and a best screenplay award from Cannes. This is what has made Farhadi one of the most magnetic names for cinephiles around the world, and his style of dramatic thrillers the subject of awe and envy. 

One could argue that the honor of opening the Cannes film festival was even bigger than the double Oscars Farhadi had won, and perhaps more significant than the Palm d’Or that Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s best-known auteur, won in 1997. Those awards recognized the achievement of particular films, but to be honored with opening the festival shows a degree of collective confidence on behalf of world cinema bestowed on a director. The fact that an Iranian film director was given the honor easily counts as a key moment in the country’s cultural history. 

“An Iranian Spirit” 

Farhadi’s film doesn’t take place in Iran and, in fact, on the face of it, it has nothing to do with the country of his birth. The film is set in a Spanish village and none of its cast and crew are Iranian, with the exception of Farhadi and his habitual editor, Hayede Safiyari. Yet, as Farhadi told IranWire, the film did continue to boast “an Eastern and an Iranian spirit,” just as one could see the traces of Persianate poetic sensibility in Kiarostami’s Japan-set Like Someone In Love (2012.) Yet Farhadi is justifiably proud of having been able to make a “totally Spanish film,” one that Javier Bardem told IranWire was “the most Spanish film” he has ever done. Bardem also added that it was an “honor” to sit next to Farhadi. 

There could hardly be a stronger symbolism at work: The Iran of Farhadi and the Iran that the likes of Trump and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei try to paint are nothing like one other. Farhadi stands for an Iran a world away from one that is surmised in the caricature of hardliners like Trump, or his counterparts in Tehran, ironically united in their eagerness to gut the Iran Deal. (We should not forget that, during the US elections, Khamenei effectively endorsed Trump and called him the most honest candidate.) 

Farhadi represents something bigger than himself. He is nothing like the festival-hopping, European-educated ‘Westernized’ Middle Eastern figure that some like to caricature him as. Prior to his international success, all his films were popular on the streets of Iran, and they continue to be. But Farhadi is indeed representative of an Iranian cosmopolitanism, best encapsulated in the mass audience that movies and novels from around the world find all over Iran, and in the long lines of Tehranis eager to watch some obscure Eastern European classic when it is screened in the capital. 

Trump’s announcement made its way into Farhadi’s press conference the morning after. As the director expressed his deep wish for his film to be shown in Iran, and as he asked the authorities to allow his fellow director Jafar Panahi to travel to Cannes to show his film Three Faces, which is part of this year’s official competition, Farhadi spoke warmly of his people, who were “warming our hearts, despite the bad day we were all having” —referring to Trump’s announcement. 

A World Beyond Borders

This is not the first time that Farhadi has crossed paths with politics. Last year in Cannes, he joined the many Iranians present, including me, who flocked to the mobile voting booth on the Promenade de la Croisette to vote in the Iranian presidential election. No prizes for guessing that he voted for President Hassan Rouhani, the architect of the nuclear deal. When he won his first Oscar, for A Separation in 2012, Farhadi used his moment in Cannes’ Kodak Theatre to speak of his “peace-loving people” and warn against war. When he won his second Oscar in 2018 for The Salesman, he boycotted the event to protest against Trump’s travel ban, which many see as a travel ban against Muslims. He instead dispatched two prominent Iranian-Canadians to the ceremony, who read out a message on his behalf. His choice of Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian who happens to be the first woman ever in space, as one of them was poetically symbolic. Having seen the world from "up there”, Ansari knew best that there is a world beyond borders. On the same night, the film was shown in London’s Trafalgar Square, on the initiative of London’s first Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrant bus drivers who knows a thing or two about cosmopolitanism. 

In the press conference on Tuesday, May 9, Farhadi said he hopes people who see his film, Iranian or otherwise, will be able to acknowledge that if an Iranian can make a film about Spanish people set in Spain, maybe we aren’t so different after all. That his style of family drama is transportable across cultures is a sign of Farhadi’s Iranian cosmopolitanism — one that gave many Iranians hope, just as the grey clouds gathered over the region in the wake of Trump’s speech.