Director Farhadi on ‘Everybody Knows’
CANNES, France — The Cannes Film Festival openingnight premiere of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows coincided almost exactly with President Trump’s announced withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.
For Farhadi, the multi-Oscar winner and one of the foremost filmmakers in international cinema, Trump’s declaration colored the celebration with a familiar melancholy. In 2017, he boycotted the Academy Awards where his The Salesman won best foreign language film in protest of Trump’s travel ban of seven Muslim-majority nations, including Iran.
Farhadi has also been critical of the Iranian regime and chafed at its censorship of artists like himself. On Wednesday, Farhadi pleaded for Iran to allow his countryman, filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who’s barred from leaving Iran, to
come to Cannes for the premiere of Panahi’s soon-to-debut film — an appeal that Panahi thanked him for with a text message.
Shot in Spain and in Spanish with a cast led by Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, Everybody Knows is Farhadi’s second film made abroad. (His The Past was made in France, in French, starring Berenice Bejo.) Everybody
Knows, about a kidnapping that unspools the dormant secrets of a family, was quickly acquired by Focus Features after its Cannes premiere, with plans for a fall Oscar campaign.
But as he explained speaking through an interpreter to a reporter on the rooftop terrace of a Cannes hotel, Farhadi doesn’t wish to be known as a globetrotting filmmaker. The 46-yearold director spoke about that, his complicated feelings for his homeland and his endless fascination with the past.
When asked how he reacted to the nuclear deal announcement, Farhadi said:
“Yesterday, many Iranians had sent me nice messages but I felt sadness also in their messages. I’ve always been criticizing the Iranian regime and they know it and they aren’t on good terms with me. But the agreement, I just can’t believe it. People had been working on it. It’s not about the Iranian government. It’s about the Iranian people. They are under pressure.
“A few years ago, when I was traveling abroad, a mother told me to tell the media that her child needs medicine. It was because of the sanctions that there was no medicine for her child. It’s an excuse to break up this agreement just for the sake of doing the opposite of whatever Obama did.”