The Salesman

Best Screenplay - Cannes Film Festival 2016

Best Actor (Shahab Hosseini) - Cannes Film Festival 2016

The Salesman is the superb new film from Academy Award winner Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, About Elly). It is a masterfully tense and emotionally complex examination of anger, fear, guilt and revenge. Through stunning performances and a near devastating screenplay, The Salesman is an unflinching examination of a marriage pushed to its limits and the frailties of Iranian society and gender politics.

When their Tehran flat is damaged in the dramatic opening scenes of the film, Emad and Rana, a young married couple, are forced to move into another flat, loaned by a friend, not realising the previous tenant was a prostitute.

Thinking it is Emad, Rana lets a stranger into the house while she is washing her hair. The assault that follows opens a rift between the couple as Rana seeks solitude and Emad seeks revenge. 

Set against a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in which Emad and Rana appear as Willy and Linda Loman, The Salesman is work of immense emotional complexity that stands proudly among Farhadi’s best films.