Farhadi Honored in Herceg Novi, Crowd Already a Fan

On Sunday evening, August 23, the Forte Mare fortress in Herceg Novi was full a full hour before the lights went down for the screening. The reason stood on the stage, not on the screen: Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian director and screenwriter, a two-time Oscar winner, received the Honorary Charter of the 39th Herceg Novi Film Festival, awarded for an outstanding directorial and screenwriting contribution to contemporary cinema and film art. The charter was presented to him by Montenegro’s Minister of Culture and Media, Tamara Vujovic, and the president of the Herceg Novi municipality, Stevan Katic, just before the audience, scheduled for 8:30 p.m., finally got to see what it had come for.

srpske.rs already covered this year’s edition of the festival, in connection with the award received by Bogdan Diklic, in his absence, with his daughter accepting the charter on his behalf. Farhadi’s visit is a different kind of recognition: this time the festival was not honoring a domestic actor, but one of the rare world-class auteurs whose name on the program is enough to guarantee a full house in advance.

The film shown that evening, “Parallel Stories”, is credited to the French production house Memento Production, was made in 2026, and runs 139 minutes. It arrived in Herceg Novi straight from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it had its world premiere, which alone shows how the festival on the Montenegrin coast now manages to fit into its own schedule titles that have only just left Europe’s biggest screens. Farhadi, incidentally, is also this year’s recipient of the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo at the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival, which made August a month of two regional honors within a few weeks of each other for him.

Farhadi was born in Iran in 1972. He graduated in dramatic arts from the University of Tehran in 1998, later earning a master’s degree in theater directing. His career built up gradually: a Silver Bear in Berlin for “About Elly” in 2009 was his first major international recognition, “A Separation” in 2011 brought him more than seventy awards including his first Oscar, and “The Salesman” in 2016 brought him his second. It is the trajectory of a director who rarely misses, which is exactly why his presence in a small coastal town, on a fortress rather than in a multiplex, feels like something the festival has to earn through the quality of its program, not just through the name on the poster.

What makes Farhadi’s films recognizable is his refusal to reduce a character to victim or culprit. His protagonists are typically caught between two things that are each right, yet mutually exclusive, and that construction is why “A Separation” and “The Salesman” are still taught as examples of dramaturgical precision, not treated as a lucky festival pick. “Parallel Stories” continues that line, judging by the title alone, which already signals a structure that does not hand the viewer a single perspective but asks them to hold several in parallel, without declaring any one of them correct.

Interestingly, the day after Farhadi’s appearance, on Monday, at the same festival, the Chilean-Danish cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro held a masterclass on cinematography and visual storytelling, in which he described the position of his craft in a line that could just as easily serve as a comment on Farhadi’s own directing method:

“I think it’s a very contradictory position, because the whole time you first have to build up your own confidence, and then you have to come back down to earth.”

Claro was talking about a cinematographer’s relationship to the director, about needing to be both an author and a storyteller while also supporting someone else’s vision. The same contradiction, only shifted from the technical to the dramaturgical side, is what keeps Farhadi’s characters in motion: they too have to build their own position and, in the same breath, put it into question.

After receiving the charter, Farhadi himself was brief and appeared genuinely surprised by the welcome. His statement, as translated by Tanjug, reads:

“I am very glad to be here for the first time, and when I arrived, I saw that many people already know and have seen my films.”

There is a mild irony in that: a man arriving in Herceg Novi for the first time found an audience that, judging by the packed fortress, had already been following him for a long time. Farhadi stays in the city through Tuesday, August 25, when from 10 to 11 a.m. he will hold a separate masterclass as part of the industry program Montenegro Film Rendezvous, organized by the Film Center of Montenegro, with Vuk Perovic as moderator. For a festival that a few years ago was primarily a regional showcase, that is a difference that can be measured, not just felt: a guest arriving straight from Cannes, and an audience welcoming him as though it has known him for years.