The Past

Asghar Farhadi's The Past (French: Le passé) won the Best Actress prize at Cannes 2013 for Bérénice Bejo's lead performance — Bejo's first major award after her breakthrough in The Artist two years earlier. The film was Iran's official submission for the 86th Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category, although it did not advance to the final five.

The film is Farhadi's first feature shot outside Iran — entirely in Paris and the surrounding Île-de-France suburbs in French and Persian — and was made immediately after the Academy Award win for A Separation (2011). Farhadi has been candid in interviews about deliberately staging this transition: The Past demonstrated that the moral-puzzle-thriller construction he had developed in his Iranian films could function in any language and any cultural context, and the project led directly to his subsequent international productions The Salesman (2016, Iran/France, Oscar winner), Everybody Knows (2018, Spain) and A Hero (2021, Iran).

The cast pairs Bejo with Tahar Rahim (lead of Jacques Audiard's A Prophet) and Ali Mosaffa, with Pauline Burlet and the breakthrough child performance of Elyes Aguis in supporting roles. Cinematography is by Mahmoud Kalari, Farhadi's regular Iranian cinematographer who flew to Paris specifically for the production; the score is by Youli Lefteri and Evgueni Galperine. Farhadi has continued to work principally as a multinational European/Iranian director, building one of the most distinguished co-production careers of any non-American filmmaker working in the 2010s and 2020s.