For the first time in Spain, the exhibition presents an approach to the universe of the filmmaker Asghar Farhadi (Homayoon Shahr, Iran, 1972) on a journey through his facet as a photographer, as well as his stage work with actors, in theatre and film.

As in the work of other filmmakers (from Stanley Kubrick to David Lynch, including Andrei Tarkovsky or Abbas Kiarostami), photography has been Farhadi’s companion for many years. Likewise, the filmmaker comes from the world of theatre, hence the many references to the performing arts that we find in his cinematographic narrative. These are the intertwined worlds of this author for whom, in his own words, ‘moving away from experimenting is dangerous’ and whom the CGAC welcomes for the first time in our country in his different artistic facets.

The Pavement, the central piece chosen by Farhadi to give the exhibition its title, is a large-scale photographic work composed of four murals of Vali Asr Street in Tehran that was recorded, over the course of a whole year, with the help of his assistants Tahmineh Monzavi and Leila Akhbari.

The four compositions could well function as cinematic sequences through which another temporality and another space appear to have been created. The pavement of this megalopolis is also the intimate and ideological space of many of his films, in which his characters face vital ethical dilemmas. Alongside several photographic series the exhibition also includes a variety of audiovisual material from his film career (videos and photographs of the making of some of his films, posters of his movies, interviews, etc.) as well as two documentary films that focus on the director’s work with actors.

Considered one of the most singular filmmakers of recent years, Asghar Farhadi is an honorary member of the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences and has placed Iranian cinema at the forefront of international filmmaking with two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film for A Separation (2012) and The Salesman, which won the Cannes Film Festival award for Best Screenplay in 2016. In Spain, he shot the feature film Everybody Knows (2018), starring Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Ricardo Darín and Bárbara Lennie, and his most recent film, A Hero, received the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021.

Exhibition organized with the support of: Morena films (España), Memento Films (Francia), Asociation MED-OCC and the  Santander Film Festival.