Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi‘s first feature in five years received a warm welcome in Cannes tonight as an enthusiastic audience gave Parallel Tales a seven-minute standing ovation.

Following the screening, French screen icon Catherine Deneuve embraced co-star Isabelle Huppert and diirector Asghar Farhadi.

Farhadi shot the feature in Paris last year. The film is yet to receive an official synopsis but the cast features Huppert, Deneuve, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney and Adam Bessa. 

It is the Oscar-winning Iranian director’s first feature since A Hero, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2021.

Parallel Tales marks Farhadi’s second French-language film after The Past with Tahar Rahim and Berenice Bejo, who won Best Actress award for her performance at Cannes in 2013.

His 2011 effort A Separation and 2016’s The Salesman both went on to win the Best Foreign Language (now International) Film Academy Award. His most recent film, A Hero took the Grand Prix in Cannes in 2021.

The film is “freely” inspired by director Krzyszof Kieslowski’s legendary ten hour television series, Dekalog. Not wanting to do the entire ten episodes, all based on the Ten Commandments, Farhadi chose Episode Six (later expanded to A Short Film About Love) to inspire a full length feature film. Its basic plot consists of a lovestruck man spying on the neighboring woman in an apartment across the street. But what Farhadi , working on the screenplay with his brother Saeed Farhadi, has accomplished is to go with the spying premise and put it in a whole new quite complicated context here as novelist, Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert) uses her telescope to peep at an apartment with three people just across the Paris avenue from her messy, rat-infested home with a lifetime of books and writing piled up in every corner.

Urging Sylvie to clean up the place so it can be sold, a friend convinces Sylvie to hire an assistant, Adam (Adam Bessa) for the heavy lifting. Things then start to go awry as Adam takes on a genuine interest in Sylvie’s creative endeavors, taking them much further than he should.

The feature will be produced by Alexandre Mallet-Guy alongside Farhadi and David Levine. Mallet-Guy has worked with Farhadi on all of his films starting with and since The Past, having originally connected with the director as the French distributor of his earlier titles including About Elly and A Separation.