Close to two decades have passed since Golshifteh Farahani was forced to flee Iran after her appearance alongside Leonardo Di Caprio in Ridley Scott’s Middle East thriller Body of Lies angered the Islamic Regime authorities in her native country.
She left behind a successful acting career and a body of award-winning Farsi language work which included Dariush Mehrjui’s The Pear Tree, Azizollah Hamidnezhad’s Iran-Iraq war drama The Tear of the Cold, Mohammad Ali Talebi’s The Wall and Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly.
The actress rebuilt her life and career outside of Iran, racking up 40 features since, with credits ranging from European productions such as Mia Hansen-Løve’s French club scene drama Eden, Hiner Saleem’s Kurdish drama My Sweet Pepper Land and William Tell to U.S. works including Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson as well as film and TV franchises Extraction and Invasion.
Farahani has often talked about the pain of exile, likening being separated from her native country to losing a limb.
However, in a sign that the actress is now equally at home in her adoptive country of France, she is presiding over the jury this week of the Deauville American Film Festival, which also honored her with a career award over the weekend.
She is joined by an illustrious line-up of French talent including screenwriter Thomas Cailley (The Animal Kingdom), actress Eye Haïdara (C’est La Vie), writer and director Katell Quillévéré (Along Came Love), actress Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu (Emily in Paris), Vincent Macaigne (Arco), choreographer Benjamin Millepied and Émilie Tronche (Samuel).
“When I got this proposition, I was really honored and I didn’t hesitate for a second,” Farahani tells Deadline. “It’s especially beautiful because it’s a French festival devoted to American independent cinema… it shows how there’s no frontier in the world of art and cinema.”
“Soon I will have spent half of my life outside of Iran but I remain Iranian. I travel with saffron; celebrate Nowruz and the fire festival of Chaharshanbe Suri, and take Hafez with me wherever I go,” she continues, referring to the 14th century lyrical Persian poet.
“I’m also French after all these years of swimming in this ocean of France and Europe, in this country and this continent and the world in general. The more I travel, the more I realize how close we all are. You realize how we are all brothers and sisters and we’re all one family.”
Farahani has just come off the set of Paris-based Afghan filmmaker Chabname Zariab’s Bells of Kabul (Les Clochettes de Kaboul).
Set against the backdrop of Afghanistan in 2021 as the Taliban take control, the storyline revolves around a young widow working in the kitchen of a so-called Bacha Bazi house, clubs where young male dancers perform for older men.
“It’s a tiny movie done with the minimum that any movie can be done with today and I’m so happy I did it,” she says. “It’s a first movie. My intuition told me I needed to do it. I always go with my gut feeling, my heart, whether it’s Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, or Extraction or a small movie.”
Bells of Kabul marked Farahani’s first shoot in nine months having taken a breather after Julia Ducournau’s Cannes 2025 Palme d’Or contender Alpha, taking inspiration from the early days of the AIDS pandemic.
Farahani co-starred as a doctor caring for people suffering from a mystery virus that turns them to stone, whose wayward teenage daughter Alpha flirts with the illness after she gets a tattoo at a party. In the backdrop, Amin, her troubled addict brother, played by Tahar Rahim, floats in and out of their lives.
“Alpha was very heavy on me,” says Farahani. “It was not an easy movie to do. Especially because my character had to bring Tahar’s character back to life maybe five times… every time it was exhausting.”
She acknowledges the critical division over the film, which is Ducournau’s second feature after Raw and Palme d’Or winner Titane.
“I belong to the camp that really loves it. It’s about understanding that Tahar’s character is a trauma. If you don’t connect to that, then maybe it’s confusing,” says Farahani. “For me, it’s a masterpiece. You don’t see many films with this sort of director’s stamp. Julia is clearly behind every scene… I defend Alpha to my core.”
Extraction and Invasion questions marks
Alongside the theatrical screen release of Alpha in France in August, Farahani has also just hit the small screen worldwide, reprising her role of Aneesha Malik in the third season of Steven Kinberg and David Weil’s sci-fi series Invasion.
The actress says she does not know whether Apple TV+ will greenlight a fourth season.
“With these platforms, you never know, suddenly they want to do it, suddenly they don’t. I guess they’re waiting to see the reaction to this season,” says Farahani.
Other U.S. productions potentially on the horizon include a third movie in the Extraction franchise, in which Farahani plays Nik Khan, sidekick to Chris Hemsworth’s mercenary protagonist Tyler Rake.
“They contacted me just recently saying that AGBO is thinking about Extraction 3, but I have no idea. For me, thinking about tomorrow is hard, when they talk about next April, it’s like, ‘Oh, my god, am I going to be on Earth?’… so, I don’t know, but I do love doing action movies because it’s like preparing for the Olympics. It’s one of the reasons I love doing these extreme action movies, they’re extreme workouts to the core, and I love that.”
“They were also talking about a spin-off of my character… but one thing I’ve learned in life as an exile, is not to think about anything that is not happening yet,” she adds.
Reconnecting with Farsi
Prior to Alpha, Farahani was on set with exiled compatriots Zar Amir Ebrahimi and Mina Kavani for Israeli director Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita In Tehran, which is adapted from Iranian writer Azar Nafisi’s autobiographical bestselling book.
Farahani played the protagonist teacher who encourages her female students to read banned western literature in revolutionary Iran. It was her first role in Farsi and related to her native country since she fled.
“I avoided roles related to Iran for a long time. Partly because when I left Iran and went to L.A., I was getting offered a lot of stereotypical Middle East roles and characters who were terrorists,” says Farahani.
“I didn’t want to get put in this box… I decided that I would never sell my soul and that I would rather play my instrument on the street, than work on projects that I didn’t believe in. So for 17 years, I didn’t do any movies related to Iran, and I did more than 40 movies in that period.”
She reveals that when Riklis first contacted her for the role, she said yes in the belief that he would never get the project off the ground, but admits that the experience was liberating.
“It was so beautiful. I realized that when I act in French, English, Hindi, or other languages, its like I’m dialing on one of those old black phones… in Farsi, it was like I was using Bluetooth… it was just so easy with everything flowing out of me. I didn’t even need to work on the dialogs, it was like I downloaded them just by looking at them,” she recounts.
Farahani is now open to doing other projects in Farsi, and dreams of a day when she will be able to return to Iran to work with the new generation of directors.
Having watched and supported Iran’s Woman Life Freedom protests, sparked by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini in September 2022, from afar, the actress says she is in awe of young filmmakers who have defied the authorities to make feature films on their own terms.
“They’re making movies on iPhone that are incredible. What’s happening today in Iran, just in terms of sociology, needs to be studied. How this happened in that country, this ocean of talent working underground with such passion. It’s a form of existential art, not intellectual, it’s existential. And that is the very core of art,” she says.
Farahani cites Saeed Roustaee as a director who she would like to work with in the future, even though he came into criticism this year for his decision to adhere to government guidelines and shoot women in hijabs for his latest film, the Cannes Palme d’Or contender Woman and Child.
“That’s a very sensitive subject,” says Farahani. “Some people argue that while women cannot sing, men shouldn’t sing either. Then there is another argument about art and the fact people need to be connected to art,” says Farahani.
“You could say let’s shut down all the cinemas and stop making films but is this the right way to go, or is it right to do some compromises, as they have done in these years to keep the wheels turning.”
The actress says she does not have answer but that she errs on the side of keeping art and culture going against the odds.
“Iranians throughout history have kept the heart of culture and art beating, not only for the 45 years of the Islamic Republic, but for thousands of years. These aren’t our only dictators. We had the Safavid, Arab invaders… regimes change, but what remains is our culture.”
This attitude also appears to extend towards Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi, of whom Farahani was highly critical of in the early days of the Woman Life Freedom protests for his perceived lack of public support for the demonstrations.
He denied suggestions that he was silent and since leaving Iran had publicly voiced support on a number of occasions.
Farahani and Asghar had a tumultuous parting of the ways after the actress’s persecution by the Iranian authorities in 2008 extended to the banning of Farhadi’s film About Elly, in which she starred.
“I have a personal background with Asghar, and when I left Iran, the way everything happened was very sad and heartbreaking, but at the same time, he couldn’t do anything. He was caring about the movie, About Elly, which was banned because of me, and he was doing everything he could do to show the movie,” she says.
“It’s a personal choice of speaking up or not. So to be honest, I can’t judge him, and if I have, maybe it was through some moments of emotional reaction about the past… I’m not in the place of judging anyone about speaking up or not. What I wish for him, is to continue making incredible movies that move people and I wish him the best to be honest.”
The post Golshifteh Farahani Talks Exile; Admiration For New Generation Of Iranian Filmmakers; Asghar Farhadi; ‘Alpha’ Shoot & ‘Extraction 3’ – Deauville appeared first on Deadline.
