In Cannes, making sure cinema isn’t lost in translation

On one afternoon at the Cannes Film Festival last year, Massoumeh Lahidji could be seen on a rooftop terrace interpreting Farsi into English for the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, and an hour later sitting on a stage with Martin Scorsese translating the famously verbose filmmaker into French.

For most, interpreting the long rat-atat answers of Scorsese, which can at any moment bound into a past realm of film history, would be a herculean task. Lahidji calmly, seemingly effortlessly translated it all, like a magic act, without so much as a pen or paper.

“I’d rather look at the face,” Lahidji said, sitting recently in a cafe in Cannes. “I don’t retain words. I work with artists who express themselves with images.”

The official language of the Cannes Film Festival is, like the Olympics,