A Separation by Asghar Farhadi: The Story of a Divorce

“Does he know you’re his son?”
“I know he’s my father!”

A Separation is the film that once again proved the power of Iranian cinema to the world. Its screening can be seen as a turning point in the history of Iranian filmmaking. To underline its significance, it is enough to recall that A Separation was the very first film from Iran and the Middle East to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Let me tell you how Asghar Farhadi stitched an entire suit for a single button.

Farhadi himself explains the famous scene in which Nader, played with extraordinary nuance by Peyman Maadi, bathes his father:
“I had this image in my mind. Later I realized it came from a story my brother once told me about a middle-aged man who, alone, was washing his elderly father suffering from Alzheimer’s. That image was like a button that compelled me to sew a whole suit around it.”

Only Asghar Farhadi could do this, turning such a small idea into a film of such magnitude. He wrote the screenplay of A Separation in just four months. The brilliance of his vision is evident even in the opening credits, where we see identification papers being copied by a machine. If you look closely, you notice the IDs belong to Mojdeh and Morteza, the couple from Farhadi’s earlier film Fireworks Wednesday. What does this mean? It means A Separation continues the world of that film, as if the story of Nader and Simin begins where Mojdeh and Morteza’s left off.

The film begins with a striking and unforgettable sequence. Nader and Simin, played by Peyman Maadi and Leila Hatami, sit before the camera explaining their reasons for divorce. This opening is so gripping that the viewer is immediately drawn in, unable to look away until the very end. The intensity builds steadily until Hojjat, played with astonishing force by Shahab Hosseini, enters the story. His arrival takes the drama to new heights. Hosseini’s performance was so powerful that even a decade later, images and gifs of his character are still widely shared online, sometimes in humorous contexts.

It goes without saying that Farhadi’s writing is extraordinary. One of the reasons for his success lies in the fact that he always writes and directs his own films. This allows him to shape dialogue and structure with the camera in mind, while also directing with a deep understanding of the words he has written. A prime example of his unforgettable dialogue comes from Hojjat’s character:
“I’ve already lost my life, sir. You think you can scare me with prison? Fear God instead!”

There are remarkable facts about A Separation, internationally known simply as A Separation, that every cinephile should know, facts that fill Iranians with pride:

• The film won more than 52 international awards and was praised by figures such as Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, and Robert De Niro.

• It became the highest-grossing Iranian film worldwide, earning around 20 million dollars, which in today’s terms equals about 240 billion tomans. Numbers like this show just how powerful cinema can be, both artistically and as a profitable industry for a country willing to support it.

• On IMDb’s list of the top 250 films of all time, A Separation holds the 109th spot, ranked higher than Batman Begins, Green Book, Raging Bull, A Beautiful Mind, The Wolf of Wall Street, Kill Bill and many more celebrated works.

• The magazine Sight & Sound listed A Separation as the second-best film in the world in 2011.

Years later, Farhadi created another masterpiece, The Salesman, which once again brought him the Academy Award. Watching both A Separation and The Salesman is highly recommended. Some may call these films “dark” in tone, but they are not works of bleak exaggeration. They do not fabricate darkness in a happy society; rather, they reflect realities already evident to all. True “blackwashing” would mean inventing misery where it does not exist. Farhadi instead holds up a mirror to undeniable truths.

Viewers should also know that the film’s ending is open. When the credits roll, you are left with a choice to ponder. You must imagine yourself in the daughter’s place and decide. This is why, even though the projection has ended, the film continues to play on in your mind.