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Cannes: Asghar Farhadi Talks Fest Favorite 'The Past,' Starring Tahar Rahim and Berenice Bejo

Festivals

In what’s turning out to be a very strong year for the Cannes Competition, it’s hard to pick a front-runner at the festival’s midway point. As many critics rate the chances of Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s “Like Father, Like Son” (not least because of a family-ties dynamic many assume will appeal to Jury president Steven Spielberg’s sensibilities), they are also looking at previous Cannes winners the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis." And this is before the Competition entries from Steven Soderbergh, Nicolas Winding Refn, Paolo Sorrentino, Alexander Payne, Roman Polanski and Jim Jarmusch have even screened. But one man sure to be in the fray for the Palme d’Or this weekend is Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi with “The Past.”

By Matt Mueller
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May 20, 2013 3:34 PM
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Video

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi won the Best Foreign-Language Oscar in 2012 for "A Separation," and now the trailer for his much-anticipated next film, "The Past" ("Le Passe"), has landed. The film stars international hot tickets Berenice Bejo ("The Artist") and Tahar Rahim ("A Prophet"), and again centers on the vagaries of long-term relationships.

By Beth Hanna
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April 9, 2013 1:22 PM
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Reviews

Belgium's official Oscar entry “Our Children,” directed by Joachim Lafosse, is based on real events that took place in a Brussels suburb in 2007, where a woman systematically murdered her children with a kitchen knife. It spans six or seven years, starting from the happy honeymoon between schoolteacher Murielle (Émilie Dequenne) and Mounir (Tahar Rahim, "A Prophet"), through the birth of their four children and the increasingly strained tension in their marriage, to the killings. This isn’t a spoiler -- the film, told in flashback, begins with a shot of four small coffins being loaded into a plane’s cargo hold.