A Separation

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi won a Golden Globe last month for his most recent film, A Separation. I haven’t seen it yet, but he has done fine work in the past.

Regime censors somehow tolerate his work even though they don’t like him and he doesn’t seem to like them. But now he’s coming under fire for winning an award in the West. “The image of our society that A Separation depicts is the dirty picture Westerners are wishing for,” Masoud Ferasati, a government-backed writer, recently said on state television. The film looks good, though depressing. And now that all the right people in Tehran are squawking about it, far more Westerners are likely to watch it than if the local Islamists would have kept quiet.