Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has described the deaths of civilians in Iran as “extremely cruel and tragic” during a press conference at the Cannes film festival.

Farhadi, whose new Paris-set drama Parallel Tales premiered on the Croisette on Thursday night, was asked about working free from censorship in France, the war involving Iran, the US and Israel, and the repression of protesters in his native country.

The director, who has lived outside Iran since 2023, said he was in Tehran last week and was still carrying the impact of “two tragic events”.

“One was the death of a number of innocent people, children, members of the civilian population who died in the war,” he said. “Before that, we had the death of a number of demonstrators, people who went to the street to protest, and they were equally innocent. These two events are extremely painful and will never be forgotten.”

Farhadi insisted it was possible to condemn both state violence and the deaths caused by war without contradiction. “To express one’s indignation in the face of the death of innocent people in the bombing doesn’t mean one is in favour of the executions and death of protesters,” he said.

“Similarly, to feel empathy for people who were shot during demonstrations doesn’t mean you can’t feel empathy for those who died in the bombings.”

He added: “Any murder is a crime. Under no circumstances can I accept the fact that another human being should lose their life, be it at war, be it executions, be it massacres of demonstrators. Its extremely cruel and tragic that, in the world today, despite all the progress we’re supposed to have made, every morning we wake up with news of new innocents being killed without any reason whatsoever.”

Parallel Tales, loosely inspired by an episode of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s television series Dekalog, stars a high-profile French cast including Isabelle Huppert, Catherine Deneuve and Vincent Cassel.

Farhadi previously won the Grand Prix at Cannes for A Hero in 2021, while his films A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016) both won the Oscar for best international feature. He boycotted the 2017 Academy Awards in protest against Donald Trump’s travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries, including Iran.

The director has also vowed not to make films in Iran while censorship laws remain in place. Earlier this year, he urged fellow film-makers to speak out against the war, calling attacks on civilian infrastructure “a war crime”.

Iranian cinema has remained a prominent presence at Cannes. Last year, dissident film-maker Jafar Panahi won the Palme d’Or for It Was Just an Accident, before later being sentenced in absentia in Iran to a prison term and travel ban over “propaganda activities”. Meanwhile, Mohammad Rasoulof received a special prize for The Seed of the Sacred Fig in Cannes in 2024, and now lives in exile in Germany.