Interview.

Iranian director is vying for the Palme d’Or for the fifth time, at the age of 54.

Asghar Farhadi is back at the Cannes Film Festival for the fifth time in competition with “Histoires parallèles”, a film shot in Paris with a stellar cast including Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Adam Bassa, Vincent Cassel, and Pierre Niney.

“Sylvie, a writer, observes her neighbors across the street – a trio that creates sound effects for nature documentaries – to feed her novel. The writer must move out so her pregnant daughter can recover the money from the sale. The daughter introduces her to Adam, a young man she met in the metro, to help with the packing. His arrival will change the course for all the protagonists in this story.

A few hours before walking the red carpet with his team, the Iranian director confided in franceinfo Culture about the hidden layers behind this film where fiction and reality blur together. Presented on Thursday, May 14th at Cannes, “Histoires parallèles” will be released in theaters on the same day.

Franceinfo Culture: What did you want to convey with this film? It’s really difficult to explain in a few words what you want to say through a film. It’s always a journey into the unknown, a curiosity that leads you down a path whose steps you don’t even know. I wanted to explore these unknown lands that opened up through the creation of this story and film. Despite everything, I think what gave me the courage to continue and develop this film project further was this question of the medium, not to mention the media, this way we look through a telescope, a small piece of a spyglass, to see bits of something and invent a whole story about those pieces. And to realize that once you cross to the other side, you see that it’s something else entirely, a different story, in the end.

How did you work on the staging to signify the shifts between reality and fiction? The border in the film is often blurry, including in the image, why? Obviously, the simplest way, if we wanted to make it easier for the viewer, would have been to create two completely distinct universes, so that in the first image, the viewer could say, here, I’m in reality, here, I’m in fiction. But since the film precisely tries to show how porous this limit is, how naturally the transition from one to the other occurs, I took the risk of letting the viewer get lost a little at the beginning, not specifically indicating to them in which world they are, since it’s about the ambiguity and porosity of this boundary between the two dimensions.

The real that inspires fiction is classic. But you imagined a story where fiction will scratch a bit of reality. Why this choice? This part is the most important of the film. Directors, authors, are inspired by reality. What interested me was to see how the narratives, how the fictions, how the stories can constitute a kind of destiny, a kind of fate that lures the characters. It’s something that I am absolutely convinced of. In our lives, the stories we are fed, the stories we are told, everything that forms our imagination, has a very strong impact on the choices we make in life and the directions we take, and that we believe we are taking freely, but in the end, they are dictated to us by all this imagination that is instilled in us. And obviously, I am also referring to the role of the media in our lives. What is presented to us as information or as documentary, these are constructed stories. And these constructed stories have a considerable part in how we form, think, project, write, evolve in our lives. And for me, it’s something much more massive than what a writer does who is inspired by reality to write.

So it is also a film that questions us about manipulation, about what can be tried to make us believe with images? Precisely, Sylvie observes her neighbors across the street who create sound effects for nature documentaries. Because if there is an area where we believe it is just fiction, where we think there is nothing invented, that it is really raw reality, nature as it is, as it presents itself to us, it is in nature documentaries. Yet we see that everything is constructed, that we use artifices to reinvent reality. It is a way for me to question, to ask a question about what is real, and to ask if what is proposed to us, shown as real, can be believed and taken literally.

It is a film that subtly speaks to us about manipulation. In this sense, can it be seen as a political film? Certainly, without making it a creed, without wanting to make it the main focus, it is part of the dimensions that are in the fold of the film.

“At the end of the film, there is a sort of liberation for Sylvie and especially for Adam, which comes through access to the imagination, right?” What I really like is when each person, based on what they have within themselves, can open the book in a certain way and perceive the film in their own way. In any case, for me, what inevitably appears at the end, what the character of Adam accesses, is a liberation through creation. It is a catharsis, an inner cleansing that the pleasure of creating brings. It’s obvious that the Adam we see at the end of the film is not the same as at the beginning.

You film Paris like a true Parisian, an intimate Paris, seen from the inside, far from clichés, why? That was one of the main challenges of the three films I shot abroad, to ensure that you don’t feel like someone who lands, discovers, and looks at the city from the outside. I can’t claim that I know Paris, that I am a Parisian, but as I have come often, I really tried to absorb Paris and render an intimate vision, precisely for a Parisian watching the film to feel at home.

You are at Cannes for the fifth time, how does that feel? Discovering your film with the Cannes audience is always a great joy, a great moment, because there is such a great diversity of spectators, it’s an event on such a global scale that it’s obviously very exciting to think that you will show this film to that audience and that you will see it, discover it with that audience. Then, as a filmmaker, when you come to Cannes with a film as a spectator, you don’t see anything. You don’t see movies, you don’t see the festival, you spend your time in interviews like this one. My best memory of Cannes remains the first time, the very first time I came here, I didn’t have a film in the selection, so I went to see films, I walked around, I was just a festival-goer, it was great!

Translation by Massoumeh Lahidji, translator of Ashgar Farhadi’s film.