Not much binds the work of Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi: the former was a sort of poète-maudit for Iranian cinema, the latter an Oscar-winning establishment figure.  But both have made films in France, very different films to be sure but films that nevertheless embody key tensions in French cinema, while maintaining traces of their earlier, Iran-forged concerns.  Kiarostami’s Copie conforme (2010), produced entirely in France, is meta-cinematic in the manner of Kiarostami’s later films such as Ten (2002), 10 on Ten (2005), or Shirin (2007), but once ensconced in the Hexagon the old Tehrani softened his edge considerably, now seeming closer to the “softer” French meta-cinema of someone like Jacques Rivette than to the “hard,” video-enabled meta-cinema of Jean-Luc Godard which had so strongly influenced work like Ten.  Farhadi, on the other hand, seems to have been focussed and sharpened by France.  A Separation (2011) was defined by a certain claustrophobia in terms of its focus on domestic and institutional interiors, but his next film Le passé took this to the next level, taking place almost entirely in the small house that the three main characters are compelled to awkwardly share.  It thus takes the form of a closely observed chamber drama, very close indeed to the work of post-Nouvelle-vague filmmakers such as André Téchiné (especially his 1986 film Le lieu du crime or his 1993 film Ma saison préférée) or Aline Issermann (especially her 1993 film L’Ombre du doute).  This tendency to become fully French in cinematic terms speaks to the lingering effects of Fracophilia that would have been part of Iran’s pre-Revolutionary intellectual life, something that is perhaps more widely diffused (although not that well understood) in the form of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000–03), which was originally written in French (Satrapi is a dual citizen of Iran and France).  One way that pre-Revolutionary sensibilities survive in key post-Revoultionary filmmakers, then, is via a particularly intense relationship with the culture of France.