CANNES, France - Ethics and civility are not synonymous with honor but it’s generally understood, by most, that if you adhere to an ethical and civil conduct in life, honor will naturally flow from it. The idea of honor endures more or less overtly in Iranian society, and Asghar Farhadi’s new film “A Hero” thrives on it as leitmotif. The honor of one man, a painter calligrapher, crushed by debt after a business venture goes south. The honor of those

Last night’s opening ceremony, which was shown to the press corps via simulcast in the Debussy theater, was pure joy, especially if you speak French. French film and theater actor Edouard Baer emceed the event with ironic bonhomie and a piano player who accompanied him as he delivered a spoken-word-style love letter to cinema and to humanity at large. With Anna Karina, the actress from “Pierrot le fou,” (this year’s poster depicts a scene from that movie) watching him in the audience, he played short clips from the film and entertained the audience with quips.

Asghar Farhadi's eighth film was shot entirely on location in Spain. Laura (Penelope Cruz) lives with her husband (played by Javier Bardem) and their children in Buenos Aires. When they return together to her native village in Spain for a family event, the trip gets derailed after unexpected events bring secrets out into the open. The family, its ties and the moral choices imposed on them are all leitmotifs of Farhadi's films and figure front and center in the script.

(from affiliate Iranian Film Daily) - “About Elly,” which stars Golshifteh Farahani (pictured) is finally getting a stateside limited release, well after the fact. Let’s remember that the year of release for this film is 2009. That’s six long years during which theater-going Americans were deprived of this slow-burning drama surrounding the mysterious disappearance of a woman vacationing at the beach with a group of friends.

Stories, whether in film or in literature, generally follow an arc. Things happen to a character or characters that we judge and like or dislike according to their personalities and their choices; situations develop, conversations take place, a certain point is reached, and there is a conclusion. In an Asghar Farhadi film (winner of an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for “A Separation,”) only the conversation part is certain. In his new film, “Le Passé,” (“The Past”) shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, people talk, not hearing each other—as when they talk through a glass pane in an airport—or hearing wrong, or hearing too much.

Nader and Simin: A Separation by Asghar Farhadi is the Iran-made candidate for Best Foreign Picture at the Academy Awards. Not only is it a superb film with nary a wasted shot, but actors Leila Hatami and Peyman Maadi (they won the Best Actor awards at the last Berlin Film Festival) give three-dimensional, wholly believable performances as the two sides of an acrimonious couple going through a sloppy divorce.

This second film by director Asghar Farhadi (pictured, below right), whose 2009 film "About Elly" already received widespread attention, has been leading the box-office in France. Parisians have been lining up and many of the screenings have required advance reservations to guarantee seating. Not bad for an axis of evil country. With decent marketing here, the same response should be anticipated even though this movie will likely only play to New York and L.A.

Why so much eagerness about it? Because “Separation” has been doing exceptionally well with the critics. Le Monde called it “excellent” and La Croix said the movie was “breathtaking” and “fascinating.” And that’s just a sampling of the praise that the film has been showered with

Iranian cinema is about to get a whole lot more interesting with Asghar Farhadi’s “Nader & Simin: A separation,” which in theory should be shown in limited release in about two months in the U.S.

Shot in semi-clandestinity in Tehran, it tells the tale of a couple, on the verge of separation, who are ripped apart by a parent’s Alzheimer’s disease and a caretaker hired to help him make it through the debilitating disease. Class differences and the slow disintegration of the couple’s life seem to be the order of the day in this narrative.

Farhadi won the Silver Bear for best director two years ago for his film “About Elly.” “Nader and Simin” was widely seen as a shoo-in for the Golden Bear, both for its outstanding quality in a year of insipid competition fare and the spotlight thrown on Iranian cinema by incarcerated director Jafar Panahi, for whom the festival kept an open jury seat for the duration of the festival.

The international jury of the 61st Berlin Film Festival, presided over by actress Isabella Rossellini, jointly awarded the Silver Bears for acting to the ensemble cast of “Nader and Simin.” Among the six actors and actresses who shared the two statues was the director’s teenage daughter, Sarina Farhadi. In the film, she plays the daughter of a feuding couple who is faced with choices of loyalty and ethics. The other honorees were Sareh Bayat, Leila Hatami, Peyman Moadi, Ali Asghar Shahbazi and Babak Karimi.

The Grand Jury Prix went to Bela Tarr’s sparse and minimalist “The Turin Horse,” about a coachman and his daughter going about their daily routine while an apocalyptic threat looms. The film has divided critics. Personally, I found the film’s purity and visual beauty masterful. But to be honest, the sparsely of dialogue, repetition of mundane actions and slowness make for an outstandingly difficult film to sit through (and I’m saying that as someone who watched all 7 ½ hours of “Satantango” in rapt concentration).

The separation itself is somewhat of a MacGuffin and does little more than set all the pieces in motion. The most we hear about marital disputes is in the tense opening scene, a single static shot that shows the spouses pleading their cases, from the perspective of the marriage clerk’s desk. Simin explains that she wants to take their eleven-year-old daughter to study and live abroad. Nader insists on staying behind to tend to his Alzheimer-afflicted father.