Published at KCActive.com on September 7, 2012
The Hunger Games
When they started casting the movie version of Suzanne Collins’ dystopian YA novels, I was in the middle of a weeklong Hunger Games marathon. As the cast took shape, I began to hear the voices of those actors in my head as I was reading. That’s when I knew the people of Panem were in good hands.
A Separation begins with two characters looking directly at the camera.
They’re in a courtroom, talking to an off-screen judge, but the audience becomes involved immediately as Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi), a middle-class Iranian couple, argue their case. This urgent intimacy permeates writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s drama, as memory, emotion and self-interest collide in the lives of otherwise ordinary people.
A Separation won the Academy Award for best foreign language film (and was nominated for original screenplay), and it illustrates how a filmmaker can work around government censorship to reveal a great deal about Iranian culture — and human nature — without being overtly political.
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