Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi‘s first feature in five years received a warm welcome in Cannes on Thursday as an enthusiastic audience gave Parallel Tales a seven-minute ovation after its world premiere screening at the Grand Théâtre Lumière.
Following the screening, French screen icon Catherine Deneuve embraced co-star Isabelle Huppert and Farhadi.
Lovely moment when Catherine Deneuve embraces filmmaker Asghar Farhadi and Isabelle Huppert following screening of #Cannes Film Festival competition film Parallel Tales pic.twitter.com/SCXCKE7k5e
— Deadline (@DEADLINE) May 14, 2026Farhadi shot Parallel Tales 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 Bérénice Bejo who won the Best Actress award for her performance at Cannes in 2013. His 2011 pic A Separation and 2016’s The Salesman both went on to win the Best Foreign Language (now International) Film Academy Award.
Huppert stars in Parallel Lives as Sylvie, an author who in search of inspiration for her new novel spies on her neighbors (Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, Pierre Niney) across the street. When she hires young Adam (Adam Bessa) to help her with her daily routine, she has no idea that he will turn her life and her work upside down, until the fiction she had imagined surpasses the reality of them all.
The film is “freely” inspired by director Krzyszof Kieslowski’s 10-hour TV series Dekalog. Not wanting to do the entire 10 episodes, all based on the Ten Commandments, Farhadi chose episode 6 (later expanded to A Short Film About Love) to inspire a full-length feature film.
The feature is 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.
The film is an official French-Italian-Belgian co-production between Mallet-Guy’s Memento Production in France, Andrea Occhipinti’s Lucky Red in Italy, and André Logie’s Panache Productions and Gaëtan David’s La Compagnie Cinématographique in Belgium. Anonymous Content in the U.S. also co-produces the film.
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