ASGHAR FARHADI’S THE PAST FROM A POSTMODERNIST PERSPECTIVE

The Iranian filmmaker, Asghar Farhadi, has contributed to national cinema of Iran which is indicative of people with a rich cultural and socio-political history. The iconography of Iranian cinema represents a thought provoking portrait of socio-ethical backdrop. Farhadi’s fame is indebted to his universal film A Separation which won the best academy award 2012. One year later, he directed The Past which nominated for 2013 the best foreign film in Cannes film festival. The Past, is an intricate drama which portraits the nostalgia for the lost wholeness of the past. This film tries to indicate that how man tries to justify his past that is stemmed from disappointment and failure by incorrect choices in life. By borrowing insights from Lyotard’s question of postmodernism, this paper attempts to study the working of postmodernism’s characteristics in Asghar Farhadi’s The Past. This paper concludes that all those features and characteristics of postmodern features together have been the real key to the sense of relativism in terms of recognition, truth, narrations, and culture on the cornerstone which postmodernism is built upon