The director is at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where he praised Mike Leigh and condemned filmmakers who are only focused on chasing success 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. 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. 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.” The director illustrated his point with a stark image: “A bomb in Afghanistan explodes and kills 10 kids; the first thing that comes to our mind is: their kids are a little different. This is part of their lives.” “Why do you think that a mother in Afghanistan, that her love for her kids is different than our mom?” “People who hate each other, if they sit in the same room, if they knew each other… Everything would be ok,” he added. Speaking about his life following two Oscars and major international projection, the director said he misses the days when he could just be at a festival, talking to people one-to-one, walking the streets, and having a more mundane, low-profile experience of a place.
It makes a distance between you and people. I would love to be closer to people. When you get this success, and they highlight it in the media, it’s very dangerous because it doesn’t give you the opportunity to make the wrong decision.
And we cannot calculate everything.” “The other thing that is important is: don’t make films for success,” he noted. They don’t enjoy the process of filmmaking. Some filmmakers love filmmaking.
Some filmmakers love to be a filmmaker. There’s a difference.” When making films in his home country, Farhadi is careful to construct characters based on nuanced ideas of language and culture, using the example of how different oaths (that is, “I swear by …”) are used by different characters. Everyone talks like each other, but in cinema, we can make different vocabularies,” he said.
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