The Past

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

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

Bejo is paired with Tahar Rahim (lead of Jacques Audiard's A Prophet) and Ali Mosaffa, with Pauline Burlet and a breakthrough child performance from Elyes Aguis in supporting roles. Mahmoud Kalari, Farhadi's regular Iranian cinematographer, flew to Paris specifically for the production; the score is by Youli Lefteri and Evgueni Galperine. Farhadi has gone on working mainly as a multinational European and Iranian director, and few non-American filmmakers of the 2010s and 2020s have built a more distinguished career in co-production.