While the script – and title – is yet to be finalised, the film is scheduled to shoot in Paris this autumn with a budget of 11 million Euros.

It will be produced and financed by Memento Films, who have distributed Farhadi’s recent films to an international audience. Memento Films International are currently seeking international sales at Cannes.

Farhadi’s last film A Separation won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars. A social-realist melodrama studying an Iranian couple’s experience of parenthood, and the toll of a father suffering form Alzheimer’s disease, A Separation also won a Golden Globe, French César and Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival 2011. It has grossed $25 million internationally

Talking exclusively to French trade magazine Film Français, Farhadi said he saw he saw his brand of cinema as “inquiring cinema.” He said: “I want to present the viewers of my films with questions rather than answers. Posing new questions to old answers.”

Alexander Mallet-Guy of Memento Films told the magazine: “I’m very pleased that Marion Cotillard has joined us in this amazing adventure,”

Marion Cotillard has established herself as France’s leading actress after her Oscar-winning role Edith Piaf in Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en Rose (2007). She has gone on to star in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, Christopher Nolan’s Inception and The Dark Knight Rises.

She has a child with French actor and director Guillaume Canet, and has already received rave reviews for the role in Jacques Audiard’s Rust & Bone, which screened for the first time in Cannes today.