A Seperation
A Separation of Nader and Simin
Director: Asghar Farhadi
Writer: Asghar Farhadi
Cast & details:
Stars: Leila Hatami, Peyman Moaadi, Shahab Hosseini, Kimiya Hosseini, Babak Karimi, Sareh Bayat, Sarina Farhadi, Merila Zarei
Genre: Drama
Runtime: 123 minutes
Language: Persian with English, Spanish, German and French subtitle.
About the movie:
A Separation won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, becoming the first Iranian film to win the award. It received the Golden Bear for Best Film and the Silver Bears for Best Actress and Best Actor at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival, becoming the first Iranian film to win the Golden Bear. It also won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Feature Film. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, making it the first non-English film in five years to achieve this.
The director Asghar Farhadi, has received two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film for his films A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016), making him one of the few directors worldwide who have won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film twice. In 2012, he was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.
Synopsis, (warning, spoilers):
Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to leave Iran with her husband Nader (Peyman Moadi) and daughter Termeh. Simin sues for divorce when Nader refuses to leave behind his Alzheimer-suffering father. Her request having failed, Simin goes back to her parents’, but Termeh decides to stay with her father, meanwhile Nader hires a young woman named Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to help look after his father.
The story begins here when Razieh and Nader get into a problem and as it becomes more serious the other people get involved and Razieh’s husband called Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), an unemployed shoemaker laden with debt and seething with resentment, humiliation and angry piety appears in the story.
Analysis:
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“The brilliance of the film is the way it manages to keep afloat, at the same time, our compassion for the two children in the case.
Showing a control of investigative pacing that recalls classic Hitchcock and a feel for ethical nuance that is all his own, Farhadi has hit upon a story that is not only about men and women, children and parents, justice and religion in today’s Iran, but that raises complex and globally relevant questions of responsibility, of the subjectivity and contingency of ‘telling the truth’, and of how thin the line can be between inflexibility and pride – especially of the male variety – and selfishness and tyranny.”