In contrast, Farhadi’s A Separation treats the life-as-elsewhere dream as one strand of a complex and multi-layered story. Farhadi’s films are nuanced portraits of the cross-cutting relations among classes, genders, and social groups. They are ambivalent explorations of the implications small personal choices can have on the delicate web of individual connections that make up any social network, carefully crafted and beautifully acted.
His third film, Fireworks Wednesday, won the Gold Hugo at the 2006 Chicago International Film Festival. His fourth film, About Elly, won him the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 59th International Berlin Film Festival and also Best Picture at the Tribeca Film Festival. The latter film is about a group of Iranians who take a trip to the Iranian beaches of Caspian Sea that turns tragic. Film theorist and critic David Bordwell has called About Elly a masterpiece.
On 19 December 2011, Farhadi was announced as being on the jury for the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival, held in February 2012.
On 15 January 2012, A Separation won the Golden Globe for the Best Foreign Language Film. The film was also the official Iranian submission for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Academy Awards where, apart from getting nominated in this category, it also received a nomination in the Best Original Screenplay category. On 26 February 2012, A Separation became the first Iranian movie to win an Oscar for the best foreign language film at the 84th edition of the Academy Awards. This marked Farhadi as the first Iranian to have won an Academy Award in any of the competitive categories. He was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in June 2012 along with 175 other individuals.A Separation also won the César Award for Best Foreign Film and the Independent Spirit Award for Best International Film that year.
The film critic Roger Ebert in his Movie Yearbook 2013 writes this about Farhadi's craft depicting social relations:
In the introduction to her 2014 book Asghar Farhadi: Life and Cinema, film critic Tina Hassannia writes:
On 26 February 2017, he won his second Oscar for Best Foreign Film for The Salesman at the 89th Academy Awards. The Salesman had already won the award for the Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival. Following Donald Trump's executive order barring Iranians from entering the country, Farhadi said he would not attend the 2017 Academy Awards, despite being nominated, and then winning, for the best foreign-language film. He then has announced two prominent Iranian Americans, Anousheh Ansari and Firouz Naderi to representing him in the ceremony. Anousheh Ansari is famed for being the first female space tourist and first Iranian in space, and Naderi as Director of Solar Systems Exploration at NASA. A few hours before the ceremony, he addressed a group of protesters in London via a video link from Iran. The city screened the movie as a celebration of the city's diversity. "This solidarity is off to a great start," he told them. "I hope this movement will continue and spread, for it has within itself the power to stand up to fascism, be victorious in the face of extremism and say no to oppressive political powers everywhere."
In Farhadi’s films such as in A Separation, we see that Iran is far from a classless society and its class system endures across the history of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. Farhadi presents the complexities of everyday life in Iran today, especially in light of the diversity that crosses social structures such as class and gender.
