'Nader' is Iran's Oscar entry

TEL AVIV -- "Nader and Simin, a Separation," the very first Iranian film to win the Golden Bear in the Berlin Film Festival, is Iran's submission within the foreign-language film race in the 84th Oscars. Pic, from author-helmer Asghar Farhadi, traces the breakdown of the middle-class couple, performed by Peyman Moaadi and Leila Hatami, in Tehran. Simin files for divorce from her husband Nader after he will not leave the nation and lift their 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) abroad, where she thinks they are able to offer her a much better future. Farhad's script does a fragile dance around Iranian censorship, never clearly addressing the government's regime but nonetheless granting politics a heady, although quiet, role. Farhadi's fifth pic is made by using a $25,000 grant in the MPA's Asia Off-shore Screen Award Academy Film Fund. Like his previous three films, including "About Elly," that also investigated Iranian middle-class malaise and won this year's Asia Off-shore Screen Academy award for the best script and also the jury grand prize, "Nader and Simin" is made without funding in the Iranian government. The Iranian Secretary of state for Culture and Islamic Guidance tried to block Farhadi from production following his speech last September by which he stated he wished banned filmmakers, including Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who's in self-enforced exile, and Jafar Panahi, who's under house arrest, could be permitted revisit the Iranian film scene. After he released a public apology for his remarks, the federal government rescinded Farhadi's prohibit. That causes it to be even more surprising that the board of nine cineastes designated through the Farabi Motion picture Foundation, a joint venture partner towards the ministry, chose "Nader and Simin." The prosperity of the film, Farhadi stated in Berlin in Feb while accepting the Golden Bear, provides him with "an excellent chance to think about the folks of my country, the nation I was raised in, the nation where I learned my tales -- an excellent people." Iran didn't submit films for Oscar consideration in early many years of the Islamic Republic after 1979's revolution. That transformed in 1994 when Abbas Kiarostami's "With the Olive Trees" was submit. Helmer Majid Majidi's "Kids of Paradise" managed to get to Oscar's foreign-language films candidate in 1997. The deadline for those nations to transmit within their distribution is March. 1. The Oscars is going to be held February. 26 in the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. Contact the range newsroom at news@variety.com