Farhadi Gets Sarajevo: Awards Don't Need an Audience
Asghar Farhadi has spent his entire career making films in that register, and the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival honouring him this August is the kind of recognition that means something precisely because it isn't a trending topic.
Farhadi Gets Sarajevo: Awards Don't Need an Audience
There is a version of cinema that exists entirely outside the conversation — no viral moment, no discourse cycle, no algorithm deciding whether it deserves to live. Asghar Farhadi has spent his entire career making films in that register, and the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival honouring him this August is the kind of recognition that means something precisely because it isn't a trending topic.
Two Oscars. *A Separation* in 2012. *The Salesman* in 2017. Both won Best International Feature Film, and both did something rarer than winning — they made the people watching them feel implicated. Farhadi doesn't make villains. He makes situations, and then he watches ordinary people reveal themselves under pressure. The discomfort is the point. The architecture of his scripts is so precise that you only understand what you missed on the second viewing, when you already know how it ends and you're watching for the moment someone could have chosen differently.
Sarajevo is the right stage for this. The festival runs August 14th, and the choice of Farhadi says something deliberate about what kind of cinema the festival wants to be associated with — not the spectacle circuit, not the IP machine, but the tradition that still believes a two-hour film about a marriage dissolving in Tehran can tell you more about being human than anything with a €200 million budget and a cinematic universe attached.
Which brings me to the other thread worth pulling this week: Ava DuVernay has quietly directed *14th*, a sequel to her Oscar-nominated *13th*, and it's coming to Netflix before the year is out. A decade after the original interrogated the Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause and the mass incarceration it enabled, she's returning to the Fourteenth — equal protection, citizenship, the gap between what the Constitution promises and what it delivers. *13th* was the kind of documentary that people watched and then sat very still afterwards. *14th* will presumably do the same thing, which means it will be discussed everywhere for a week and then carefully not discussed by the people who need to think about it most.
Two films, two festivals, two different kinds of courage — one in the craft, one in the subject. The craft is Farhadi. The subject is DuVernay. The week's actually doing something.
The verdict: *A Separation* if you haven't. *14th* the moment it drops. Everything else can wait.
