General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

About Elly (درباره الی)

About Elly (Persian: Darbareye Elly, درباره الی) is a 2009 Iranian drama film written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, in which a weekend holiday on the Caspian Sea collapses into recrimination after a young teacher invited by the group disappears without a trace. It was Farhadi's fourth feature and his last film before the internationally released A Separation (2011), and it won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 59th Berlin International Film Festival and Best Film at the Tribeca Film Festival.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Darbareye Elly (درباره الی); French title A propos d'Elly¹
Country, year, language	Iran, 2009, Persian, color¹
Running time	118 minutes¹
Writer, director, producer	Asghar Farhadi, produced with Mahmoud Razavi for Simaye Mehr¹
Principal cast	Golshifteh Farahani (Sepideh), Taraneh Alidoosti (Elly), Shahab Hosseini (Ahmad), Mani Haghighi (Amir), Peyman Moadi, Saber Abar (Alireza)²
Major awards	Silver Bear for Best Director, 59th Berlinale 2009; Best Film, Tribeca Film Festival 2009; NETPAC Award, Brisbane IFF 2009¹
Position in Farhadi's career	His fourth feature, made before A Separation³

Spoilers

Plot and structure

Three married couples, friends since their college days, drive from Tehran to a villa on the Caspian coast for a weekend holiday, bringing two unattached guests: Ahmad, the brother of one of the wives, recently divorced from his German wife and visiting from Germany, and Elly, a young teacher who teaches Sepideh's daughter. Sepideh has invited Elly in the hope of matching her with Ahmad, without telling either of them her motive.⁴^•⁵

The holiday begins in high spirits, but the deception starts immediately. The villa Sepideh had promised is available for only one night, a fact she had concealed from the others, and she persuades the caretaker to open a disused villa on the pretext that Ahmad and Elly are newlyweds, a lie that embarrasses Elly and later backfires when her fiancé Alireza appears.⁴ Elly disappears during a seaside picnic while watching the children, and the search for her turns into a cascade of confusion, accusations, and escalating crises as the group's small lies and social performances unravel under pressure.⁶ As the friends look for clues, they learn of Elly's own concealments: her mother did not know her whereabouts that weekend, and neither did her fiancé, whose revelation of the impending marriage unsettles the group.⁷

The film opens with the friends shouting with exuberance as they drive through a tunnel and ends two days later on a beach, trying without success to push a car clear of the encroaching waves, images the film's reviewers read as the arc from carefree exhilaration to bogged-down misery.⁴ Despite its title, the film is in many readings less about Elly than about Sepideh, the group's charming, unacknowledged leader, whose belief that matters can always be adjusted to suit her desires drives the plot.⁴

Themes and style

Farhadi's subject is the mechanics of lying. The Cinema Guild's synopsis describes the film as less concerned with Elly's disappearance itself than with the mechanisms of deceit, brutality, and betrayal that come into play when ordinary circumstances take a tragic turn.⁸ Like A Separation, it examines the Tehrani upper-middle class, educated, cultured, and only marginally religious, and carries a subtext of critique of the lies and evasions that permeate Iranian society.⁴^•⁸ Reviewers have also read the film as an examination of how a possessive, sexually puritanical culture turns a well-meant matchmaking scheme into something resembling a criminal conspiracy, with the group's notions of decency governing even who may speak to the missing woman's family.⁹

Farhadi stated his method directly: "Cinema audiences have grown more mature and directors can no longer be content with force feeding them a set of preconceived ideas. Rather than asserting a world vision, a film must open a space in which the public can involve themselves in a personal reflection."⁸ Accordingly, apart from a song over the final credits, he uses no music to direct the mood, relying on script, lighting, camera work, and his ensemble cast.⁴ Information is distributed unevenly among the characters and kept incomplete for the audience, so that each new disclosure retroactively reframes what the viewer thought was understood.¹⁰

Reception and comparisons

Critics have repeatedly compared the film to Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960), which likewise turns on the disappearance of a woman during a seaside outing; Philip Kemp, writing in Sight and Sound, judged the comparison limited, since Antonioni is largely indifferent to the group's dynamics after the disappearance while for Farhadi those dynamics are the film's chief rationale.⁴ Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian placed the film's points of reference with European cinema, Polanski's Knife in the Water and L'Avventura, and credited Farhadi with Michael Haneke's eye for the dynamics and symptoms of group guilt.¹¹ A scholarly chapter by Elżbieta Wiącek, a researcher at Jagiellonian University, examines the film as a rewriting and re-veiling of Antonioni.¹²

The film was a hit in Iran and won widely abroad: in addition to the Berlin and Tribeca prizes, it took the Crystal Symorgh for best director and the Public Choice Award at the 27th Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran, Best Film at the Kerala IFF, and Best Screenplay and the Jury Grand Prize at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards in 2009.¹ One year after its release it was voted the fourth greatest Iranian movie of all time by the national society of Iranian critics.³

Censorship and release history

The film's path to audiences was interrupted twice. It premiered at the 27th Fajr Film Festival despite objections from officials, was seized several times, and went into wide release in Tehran and the provinces from mid-June 2009 (Khordad 1388 in the Iranian calendar).¹³ It was later temporarily banned after Golshifteh Farahani appeared unveiled in Ridley Scott's Body of Lies and on that film's red carpet; the ban was lifted, and one scholar notes that in one of the few such instances in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, President Ahmadinejad intervened so the film could be exhibited.¹⁴

Its Western theatrical life came late. After A Separation won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, interest in Farhadi's back catalog brought About Elly to the United Kingdom in September 2012¹¹, but it did not receive a proper United States release until 2015, distributed by The Cinema Guild.¹⁰ Farhadi also reported that one Japanese film festival declined the film because its depiction of Iran differed from the image most foreigners held of the country.³

Place in Farhadi's work

About Elly is widely treated as the film in which Farhadi's authorial method crystallized: ordinary social rituals examined closely until they expose larger cultural hypocrisies, a technique carried into A Separation.⁹^•¹⁰ Its international impact also had commercial consequences: the French company Memento Films International subsequently purchased the rights to distribute A Separation, in collaboration with DreamLab, and those rights were in turn acquired for the American market by Sony Classics after the film's Berlinale premiere.¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2000s › Biographical and historical drama films 2000s › Released 2006 to 2009

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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