Asghar Farhadi Condemns Politicians and Media for Fueling Division, at Sarajevo Film Festival
The two-time Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi used his appearance at the Sarajevo Film Festival on 20 August 2026 to condemn politicians and the media for focusing on "difference" and "hate," arguing that mothers everywhere share the same emotions toward their children. Variety
Farhadi was in Sarajevo to receive an honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award and as the subject of a career retrospective. The festival's tribute placed him among the select group of film-makers the event has singled out for their body of work rather than a single title.
His credentials make the case on their own. Farhadi has won two Academy Awards and a Golden Bear, the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. His 2011 drama A Separation was Iran's first-ever Oscar-winning film and earned $25 million worldwide — a striking figure for a foreign-language release, where the audience ceiling is typically far lower than for English-language studio titles. His 2016 film The Salesman earned $4.3 million in Iran, according to Variety.
In Sarajevo, Farhadi spoke about the cost of success. He called it "very dangerous," because it creates distance between a person and other people and removes the opportunity to make wrong decisions — mistakes he sees as essential to staying connected to the world a film-maker tries to portray. He also offered a principle that has guided his career: the more local and honest a film is, the more universal it becomes.
His comments on division carry weight given what he has said about conflict in recent months. At the Cannes Film Festival in May 2026, Farhadi said he continues to be jolted by atrocities in Iran, which remains at war, Deadline reported. Asked about the Iran war at Cannes, he said "any murder is a crime" and called the war "extremely cruel and tragic," according to Variety. In a separate interview days before Sarajevo, he said he is against war everywhere — not only in Europe and the Middle East, The Hollywood Reporter reported.
Farhadi's films — A Separation, The Salesman, The Past, Everybody Knows — turn on moral dilemmas inside families: divorce, obligation, pride, the gap between what people say and what they do. His argument in Sarajevo extended that lens outward. If a mother in Tehran and a mother in Sarajevo feel the same fear for a child, the politicians and headlines insisting on irreconcilable difference are not describing reality. They are, in his view, manufacturing it.
That is a film-maker's conviction, not a policy proposal. But coming from a director whose work has been nominated for Oscars across three decades and has earned festival honours from Berlin to Cannes to Sarajevo, it carries a particular weight: the weight of someone who has spent a career looking closely at how people fail each other, and why.
