Parallel Tales

Writer Sylvie (Huppert) is in need of a successful new novel and is on the search for inspiration. She is also being forced to vacate her Paris apartment. Desperate, she spies on her neighbours across the street using a telescope. There she observes brothers Nico (Cassel) and Theo (Pierre Niney) and their colleague Nita (Virginie Efira), who work in a sound studio. Their imagined lives and romantic situations initially provide promising material for Sylvie. But when she hires the mysterious young man Adam (Adam Bessa, Ghost Trail, SFF 2024) to assist her pack up the apartment, and shares with him her observational tactics and the resulting work, the line between fiction and reality begins to blur. Farhadi (winner of the Sydney Film Prize in 2011 for A Separation) is a master in conveying ambiguity and placing his characters in the grip of moral dilemmas. Here, in a film loosely based on Krzysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog: Six, he explores how surveillance and storytelling can have a deep impact on reality. Coming from the highly surveilled Iran, where Farhadi is no longer able to make films, Parallel Tales feels like his clarion call for the liberating power of the imagination.