Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi used an appearance at the Rio Film Festival to deliver an unusually direct criticism of Hollywood’s portrayal of countries such as Iran, arguing that films like Argo perpetuate an American “white savior” mentality and reflect a broader assumption that the United States occupies a position above the rest of the world.
Farhadi, who was in Rio to present Parallel Tales, was asked about Ben Affleck’s Argo, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture a year after Farhadi’s A Separation received the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Recalling his reaction to the film, Farhadi described Argo as a typically Hollywood construction and questioned the worldview behind such representations of Iran.
“The problem with these kinds of films in Hollywood [and] some people in the United States [is that] they look at the world from up to down,” Farhadi said. “Why do you feel you’re up and we’re down?”
His criticism went beyond Argo itself. For Farhadi, the film is an example of a recurring tendency in mainstream American cinema in which an American—often a white American—enters another country and assumes the role of rescuer.
“They make these movies for money; it’s a business,” Farhadi said. “And in these films it’s always a white guy from the United States saving others.”
He then posed the question that most sharply summarized his objection: “Why does an American go to Cuba or Iran to save people? People understand they can save themselves. Who asked you to come and save us?”
Farhadi also challenged the assumption that other societies should naturally aspire to resemble the United States. Even when such an attitude presents itself as sympathetic or benevolent, he said, there is often an underlying expectation that other countries should eventually become “like us.”
Farhadi rejected that premise directly: “No, I don’t want to.”
The filmmaker drew partly on his own experience of spending several years in the United States while developing a project that would ultimately become Parallel Tales. During his research, he visited prisons and spoke with Black inmates and people from immigrant backgrounds. Those encounters, he said, exposed him to an America quite different from the image most frequently projected to the rest of the world.
“The real America was there,” Farhadi said, adding that people outside the United States rarely see that side of the country.
His remarks led into a broader discussion of the relationship between cinema and politics. Farhadi argued that a filmmaker does not have to make an explicitly political film for politics to be present. The moment cinema begins seriously examining a society—its families, relationships, economic pressures and conflicts—it inevitably encounters politics.
“Whenever you talk about society, you are talking about politics,” he said. Even a film centered on family relationships and everyday difficulties can indirectly reveal the political environment in which those lives unfold.
At the same time, Farhadi emphasized that he deliberately avoids direct political messaging in his own films. For him, cinema becomes less interesting when it tells spectators what they are supposed to think. The kind of filmmaking he believes in gives audiences enough space to discover meanings for themselves.
As an example, Farhadi pointed to Abbas Kiarostami’s 1983 documentary Fellow Citizen, which he described as one of Iran’s most political films. Kiarostami’s film appears to concern something as ordinary as Tehran traffic and motorists dealing with authorities, but Farhadi argued that the way ordinary people interact with the police reveals numerous layers of power and politics. The politics are not announced; they emerge through human behavior.
Farhadi extended the same argument to the media, warning against believing that either news coverage or cinema can offer a complete image of another country’s daily life. “Media and cinema don’t give you a complete image of people’s ordinary life,” he said.
When the same incomplete image of a society is repeated again and again, Farhadi suggested, it can eventually prepare an audience to accept the idea that the people being represented are somehow an enemy. He connected that process to the concentration of media power, noting that the world’s most influential media organizations are themselves connected to powerful interests. For Farhadi, however, cinema can also work in precisely the opposite direction.
At its best, film reminds audiences that the emotional lives of people separated by nationality, language and politics remain fundamentally recognizable. Love between a mother and child in Brazil, he observed, is at its core the same emotion as the love between a mother and child in Tehran, even though the cultural expression of that love may be different.
That belief in shared human experience has long been central to Farhadi’s cinema, where political and social realities are rarely expressed through speeches or slogans but instead emerge from relationships, moral choices and incomplete information.
His comments in Rio therefore amounted to something broader than an attack on Argo. Farhadi was questioning a system of representation in which one culture assumes the authority to define another—and particularly the recurring Hollywood fantasy that an outsider must arrive to rescue people who supposedly cannot rescue themselves.
For Farhadi, cinema becomes more truthful when it abandons that hierarchy and allows people, wherever they live, to appear not as symbols, victims or people waiting for salvation, but simply as human beings capable of understanding and shaping their own lives.
