In this presentation, I will analyze Asghar Farhadi’s 'The Separation of Nader from Simin' as an attempt to challenge the pathos of distance and the idealization of otherness which haunts films such as Jafar Panahi’s 'White Balloon' (1995) and Abbas Kiarostami’s 'The Wind Will Carry Us' (1999). In the White Balloon, Panahi’s heroes are children that animate, in their beings, the purity of form yet to be broken by the corruption of the guilt-ridden public. In Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, it is the unspoiled spirit of the villagers as set against the initially cynical arrival by the cameramen who then obscure the very forms that they fear their representation would exploit -- and perhaps -- contaminate. I provide a reading how the latter two films, in exalting the idealization of particular states of being (the innocence of children, or the simple grace of villagers) simultaneously betray the concomitant anxiety of contamination (of those otherwise supposedly static states). These markers of idealized and fetishized innocence that are always and already on the verge of a great and inevitable fall, stage the impossibility of justice as a melancholic loss without return. In contraposition to these worlds as always already formed, separable, and inevitably doomed, Farhadi’s 'A Separation' shows how realities that are seemingly divided by gender, class, generation, religion, and levels of commitment nonetheless interpenetrate, revealing the idealized and/or demonized other firmly within the self. This disruption of the (melancholic) anticipatory gesture of arrival is both reflected in the deep sadness that pervades the film, and also in the therapeutic function of/to the audience, who is left to map the trajectories of failure and loss without being privileged by the possibility of delivering a final judgment.