Isabelle Huppert and Vincent Cassel to Star in Asghar Farhadi’s ‘Parallel Tales’

This is Farhadi's first film since his controversial 2021 Cannes Grand Prix winner "A Hero."

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi has announced his next film, four years after winning the Cannes Grand Prix in 2021. The Oscar-winning director will helm “Parallel Tales,” also known as “Histoires Parallèles,” with Isabelle Huppert and Vincent Cassel starring. Farhadi is set to begin production in Paris in fall 2025, with a release in France planned for spring 2026.

“Parallel Tales,” which will be a French-language film, brings Farhadi back to France after he previously filmed 2013’s “The Past” there. The “Parallel Tales” cast marks the first collaboration between iconic French stars Huppert and Cassel, who will also be joined by Virginie Efira, Pierre Niney, Catherine Deneuve, and “Ghost Trail” breakout Adam Bessa. No other details on the plot are available at this time.

The film will be an official French-Italian-Belgian coproduction between Alexandre Mallet-Guy’s Memento Production in France, Andrea Occhipinti’s Lucky Red in Italy, and André Logie’s Panache Productions and Gaëtan David’s La Compagnie Cinématographique in Belgium. 

Anonymous Content in the U.S. will also co-produce the film. Farhadi and David Levine produce. Carole Baraton, Yohann Comte, Pierre Mazars, Yousra Filali, Stefano Massenzi, Chadwick Prichard, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Maciej Musial, and Lila Yacoub are executive producing.

“Parallel Tales” will launch as a sales title during the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, with Charades handling international sales and UTA Independent Film Group for U.S. rights. Memento is already distributing the film in France. 

This is the fifth consecutive collaboration between Farhadi and Memento Productions. The preceding features include 2014’s “The Past,” 2016’s “The Salesman,” 2018’s “Everybody Knows,” and 2021’s “A Hero.”

Farhadi’s Golden Globe-nominated “A Hero” was part of a plagiarism lawsuit after one of Farhadi’s former students, Azadeh Masihzadeh, alleged that Farhadi based the film off a documentary she had made in one of his Tehran-based filmmaking workshops in 2014. Both her documentary and Farhadi’s narrative feature were inspired by a real-life incident in 2011 in which a man in Iran on furlough from a debtors’ prison found a bag of gold coins and returned them to their owner rather than keeping them for himself.

“Incorrect information has been corrected,” Farhadi said in May 2022 while serving on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival. “What is in the film ‘A Hero’ is different. You have to see why certain journalists spread misinformation. What I did in ‘A Hero’ is not related to that workshop; it is based on a current event two years prior. ‘A Hero’ is one interpretation of the event. The documentary is another approach, they are not the same at all.”

Farhadi was acquitted by an Iranian court in 2024.