TEHRAN – Two feature films by Iranian directors will be shown at the 73rd Sydney Film Festival, which will run from June 3 to 14 in Australia.

Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales” will compete in the Official Competition section and Shahram Mokri’s “Black Rabbit, White Rabbit” will be screened in the Features section, ISNA reported.

Farhadi’s 10th feature film, which will premiere at the 79th Cannes Film Festival (held in France from May 12 to 23) is a French-Italian-Belgian coproduction with a stellar cast including Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, Pierre Niney, Adam Bessa, and Catherine Deneuve.

Shot in Paris, Farhadi delivers a layered, complex drama about a writer using surveillance for inspiration. Sylvie (Huppert) is in need of a successful new novel and is on the search for inspiration. She is also being forced to vacate her Paris apartment. Desperate, she spies on her neighbors across the street using a telescope. There she observes brothers Nico (Cassel) and Theo (Niney) and their colleague Nita (Efira), who work in a sound studio. Their imagined lives and romantic situations initially provide promising material for Sylvie. But when she hires the mysterious young man Adam (Bessa) to assist her pack up the apartment, and shares with him her observational tactics and the resulting work, the line between fiction and reality begins to blur. 

Farhadi (winner of the Sydney Film Prize in 2011 for “A Separation”) is a master in conveying ambiguity and placing his characters in the grip of moral dilemmas. Here, in a film loosely based on Krzysztof Kieslowski's “Dekalog: Six,” he explores how surveillance and storytelling can have a deep impact on reality.

Asghar Farhadi, 54, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2012 for “A Separation” (which was also nominated for Best Screenplay) and once again in 2017 for “The Salesman”.

He has been selected four times in competition in Cannes with “The Past,” “The Salesman,” “Everybody Knows,” and “A Hero”.

“The Salesman” won Best Screenplay and Best Actor awards at Cannes in 2016 and “A Hero” scooped the Grand Prize at the 2021 festival.

“Everybody Knows,” Farhadi’s Spanish-language debut starring Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, opened and competed at Cannes in 2018.

Farhadi was also selected twice in Berlin. He was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Director in 2009 for “About Elly” and the 2011 Golden Bear for “A Separation”.

In addition to “Parallel Tales,” there are other Cannes 2026 premieres playing in Sydney’s official competition this year including Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland,” and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Sheep in the Box”.

The festival will show 248 films from 81 countries, with screenings hosted at Sydney Opera House, State Theater, and cinemas across the city.

The competition also includes Sundance hits Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite” and Australian horror “Leviticus,” as well as Berlinale competition premiere “Dao” and opener “No Good Men”.

The festival jury will be presided over by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, alongside Singaporean filmmaker Boo Junfeng, Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, Australian cinematographer Ari Wegner and director Sally Riley.

Shahram Mokri’s “Black Rabbit, White Rabbit,” which had its world premiere at the 30th Busan International Film Festival in South Korea last September, will be shown in the non-competitive Features section of the upcoming Sydney Film Festival.

Mokri’s fifth feature film is a joint production of Tajikistan and the United Arab Emirates and deals with three people’s destinies that intertwine through apparently unrelated events.

Chekhov’s famous dramatic adage – if a gun appears, it must be fired – sets the scene for Mokri’s audacious latest, set in Tajikistan and replete with his hallmark virtuosic long takes, wry humor, and interlinking narratives. 

A wealthy wife, wrapped in bandages from a car accident, starts to suspect her husband of foul play. On the set of a remake of a classic Iranian film, an experienced armorer fears the prop gun might be real. At an acting audition, a young woman pulls a rabbit out of a hat. These seemingly unrelated stories combine into a playfully intriguing whole, with a healthy dose of magical realism and meta-textuality.

Shahram Mokri, 47, won the Venice Film Festival's Horizons Award in 2013 for Creative Content for his second feature film “Fish & Cat”. 

In 2018, his third film “Invasion” was screened at the 68th Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for the Teddy Award.

He also won a silver Hugo medal at the Chicago Film Festival in the main section and the Venice Critics' Best Screenplay Award for his fourth film “Careless Crime”.

The cast of the 139-minute movie includes Babak Karimi, Hasti Mohammai, Kibriyo Dilyobova, and Bezhan Davlyatov, among others. 

Since its inception in 1954, the Sydney Film Festival, recognized by the Federation Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Films (FIAPF), has increased in size and reputation to become a leading international film festival in Australia.

The festival takes place each June at venues across Sydney. Its program celebrates the best of world cinema, screening features, documentaries, short films, retrospectives and a series of industry and public talks.

**** Photo: A screenshot from Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales”

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