Asghar Farhadi will be honoured with the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo at the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival (14-21 August). The acclaimed Iranian director and screenwriter will accept the award in person, while a retrospective of his work will be presented as part of the festival’s Tribute To programme. Farhadi returns to Sarajevo after serving as president of the jury for the feature film competition at the festival’s 2018 edition, where his film Everybody Knows screened in the Open Air programme.

“It is difficult to overstate Asghar Farhadi’s significance to world cinema. His remarkable body of work reminds us that the most profound dramas are often concealed within everyday life. His films do not offer easy answers; instead, they invite us to look more closely, listen more carefully and engage with life’s complexities. We are honoured to welcome Farhadi back to the festival and to present him with the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo,” said Jovan Marjanović, director of the Sarajevo Film Festival.

After the success of About Elly (2009), for which he won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale, Farhadi gained international recognition and critical acclaim with A Separation (2011), receiving no fewer than 70 awards, including the Berlinale's Golden Bear, an Academy Award and a César for Best Foreign Film. He then left Iran for France to shoot The Past, which won Bérénice Bejo the Best Actress Award at Cannes. He later returned to Iran to direct The Salesman, which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won Best Screenplay and Best Actor (for Shahab Hosseini). The film became Farhadi’s biggest success and earned him the second Academy Award of his career. His latest films A Hero and Parallel Tales, his second French production, also competed at Cannes, with the former winning the Grand Prix.