Dear Asghar Farhadi,
There is something dreadful about this earth, said Jean Renoir, which is that everyone has his own reasons. Rule of the Game, you are in favour of everyone exposing them freely. Your cinema, dear Asghar Farhadi, is that of a suspended morality where the lie of one is the truth of the other. This is what makes the success of your films where the public, the only real referee, can identify with all your characters.
A young lover of photography and then a graduate of theatrical studies, your two passions profoundly mark your cinematographic universe where the vivacity of dialogue and the mastery of silences borrow from Harold Pinter whose work you studied at the University of Tehran.
Of Dance in the dust to the Children of Belle Ville, your first films, from The Festival of Fire to About Elly that make you known to the public, up to your two immense international successes, A Separation and The past, your camera always finds the right distance. It accurately describes what often separates people from their dreams. You subtly oppose those who decide, like Simin in A Separation, to sacrifice the past to the future or on the contrary those who, like Marie, Amhad or Samir, the protagonists of your last film, refuse to detach themselves from it.
“The more local a film is, the more universal it is” said Vittorio de Sica. You film Iran in what is most familiar and therefore universal: the family in the intimacy of the apartment, the justice in the corridors of a court, the friendships and aspirations of the youth the time spent with friends at the seaside.
Iran is a huge country of cinema that is close to us by the light and the landscapes that we love through Iranian cinema and through you.
Like a painter working with his miniatures in successive touches, you film the detail with special attention, the purest Iranian artistic tradition: a scarf caught in the wheel of a motorcycle or a fixed shot on a kite that bodes for the worst. In each of your films, the minute, the almost nothing, the insignificant bring a resolution to the suspense, almost hitchcockian, which intensifies as the plot is tied: a tear rolling on an inert cheek, the singular noise of a lighter, a smell…
It is this work of extreme precision, this control of every movement, of every emotion, this way of saying things by devious ways that allow you to circumvent censorship without compromising.
In each of your films, women, far from clichés, are resolutely modern. You have given the actresses who have worked alongside you some of their most beautiful roles, like Bérénice Béjo, who last year received the Prix d'interprétation féminine in Cannes for The Past, but also of Golshifteh Farahani upsetting just in Speaking of Elly, or of Leila Hatami, who has left a lasting mark on A Separation with your daughter, Sarina, whose performance keeps the spectator in suspense until the last second of the film. The male roles are not outdone, I think especially of the character of Amhad in The Past, remarkably interpreted by Ali Mossafa.
You have surrounded yourself with faithful actors who, film after film, create a real complicity between the public and your work: we thus find Taraneh Allidousti under the features of Elly, of Rouhi in The Festival of Fire and Firoozeh in the Children of Belle Ville but also Peyman Maadi in About Elly and A Separation. You owe your success to this admirable direction of actor that gives real depth both to the young protagonists, as Fouad in The Past, that to the group in About Elly.
Thanks to the company Mémento, which produces your films in our country, the French public has been able to discover the echoes and resonances at the heart of your work, which announce your greatest successes. Through you, I also distinguish today a beautiful production company that is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year and whose directors I greet, Alexandre Mallet-Guy and Emilie George, at the service of auteur cinema around the world. I also salute the essential support of Daniel Goudineau, Director General of France 3 Cinema, who believed in the project and contributed with the other co-producers to the success of the Past.
It is the pride of French cinema to know how to welcome the world’s great directors and give them windows to express themselves.
Greeted early by your peers and criticism, you reach the consecration with A Separation which earned you a Golden Bear, a César, a Golden Globe and an Oscar! The last Cannes Film Festival distinguished your work The Past and we wish you the best tomorrow for the Caesars where he is nominated 5 times.
Your rewards, you dedicate them, and I quote, “to the Iranian people who respect all cultures and despise hostility and resentment, a people who are happy to see that as political tensions rise, Iran is recognized around the world for the richness of its culture.” You never forget, not your brothers in arms but your brothers in light, all the Iranian directors who suffer censorship, exile and imprisonment: in Berlin, at the time of receiving your prize, contemplating the empty chair of Jafar Panahi, Sentenced a few months earlier to 6 years in prison and 20 years of film ban, you send all your support to this immense director praised by the 2012 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought of the European Parliament.
Your success is also that of an Iranian cinema, rich in its diversity, its audacity and its spirit of resistance, which wrote among the most beautiful pages of the 7th art. France has always loved this cinema. Today, after welcoming you for your last film in which you gave her back all the love she has for you, France, which prides itself on being a land of creation and welcome for all artists, distinguishes you in turn by this medal created by Malraux.
The Republic of Arts and Letters, whose values you hold high by this living and committed Iranian cinema that you make live in spite of political difficulties, today sends you its tributes.
Dear Asghar Farhadi, on behalf of the French Republic, we present you with the insignia of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Paris, 27 February 2014