Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has described the deaths of civilians in Iran as “extremely cruel and tragic” during a press conference at the Cannes film festival . Farhadi, whose new Paris-set drama Parallel Tales premiered on the Croisette on Thursday night, was asked about working free from censorship in France, the war involving Iran, the US and Israel, and the repression of protesters in his native country. The director, who has lived outside Iran since 2023, said he was in Tehran last week and was still carrying the impact of “two tragic events”. “One was the death of a number of innocent people, children, members of the civilian population who died in the war,” he said. “Before that, we had the death of a number of demonstrators, people who went to the street to protest, and they were equally innocent. These two events are extremely painful and will never be forgotten.” Farhadi insisted it was possible to condemn both state violence and the deaths caused by war without contradiction.…