According to Variety, award-winning Iranian actor Shahab Hosseini has been cast in the lead role in Mitra Tabrizian’s (born in Britain) second feature-length film, The Far Mountains. Hosseini and Tabrizian are reuniting for The Far Mountains, which is billed as a “nuanced coming-of-age narrative with an allegorical undertow” and in which he also appeared in her first feature film, Gholam. Hosseini has collaborated with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Asghar Farhadi on several occasions, but his portrayal as the title character in 2016’s The Salesman is what brought him the most attention from the general public.
There, Hosseini portrayed Emad, a Tehran-based actor who, along with his wife Rana, is performing in a stage adaptation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (Taraneh Alidoosti). When Rana is assaulted in the apartment she and Emad are temporarily renting, tensions in the theatre increase, and Emad, played well by Hosseini, becomes increasingly determined to track down the perpetrator and exact punishment upon them.
Tabrizian, meantime, cut her teeth on photography and short films before debuting with 2017’s Gholam. “The narrative of an Iranian taxi driver in London stuck between two worlds that progress almost inevitably from observational drama to creepy quasi-thriller,” as described by the film’s critic, Hosseini (who also plays Gholam), is told in both English and Farsi. The film has both a UK theatrical release and a worldwide streaming release.
Zadoc Nava of Stray Dog Films, who previously produced Gholam, will present Tabrizian’s The Far Mountains at Locarno’s Match Me! A start date for filming The Far Mountains has not yet been announced.