Imagining being an Oscar winner, one of your country’s most accomplished filmmakers, and going through the humiliation of being accused of plagiarising one of your most acclaimed films.
That’s exactly what’s currently happening to Iranian icon Asghar Farhadi. Winner of two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Feature – 2012’s A Separation and 2018’s The Salesman – it’s his most recent film that’s in contention.
A Hero won the prestigious Jury Grand Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival but a court is about to decide if it was actually Farhadi’s original idea.
One of his former students, Azadeh Masihzadeh, has filed a lawsuit against the director, claiming that he stile the idea for A Hero from her documentary, All Winners, All Losers, that she made for his class (as per The Hollywood Reporter).
Alongside the man that inspired her documentary, Masihzadeh is now suing Farhadi for defamation. The case dates back to 2014, when Masihzadeh attended a class workshop put on my Farhadi in Tehran.
Students were asked to research real life stories to make documentaries, which is when she came across the story of Mr. Shokri, a man who found a bag of gold during leave from debtors prison but decided to return the money.
According to a classmate, everyone in the class – including Farhadi – were shocked by the story. Fast forward seven years later and the plot of A Hero, Masihzadeh claims, is strikingly similar to her documentary.
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The stakes couldn’t be any higher: she incredibly risks up to two years in prison and 74 lashes if she’s found guilty of a false accusation. Farhadi, meanwhile, may be required to relinquish “all income earned by the screening of the film in theaters or online” to his former student if he’s found guilty.
That’s not the only twist in the story: Masihzadeh claimed in 2019 that the director had her sign the rights to the story over to him, but she later regretted doing this. “I shouldn’t have signed it, but I felt under great pressure to do so,” Masihzadeh explained. “Mr. Farhadi is this great master of Iranian cinema. He used that power he had over me to get me to sign.”
Farhadi’s representatives, though, are claiming that the idea for A Hero came to him much earlier. “Mr. Farhadi found inspiration for the main theme of the story—which is creating heroes in society — based on two lines of (the) Bertolt Brecht play (Life of) Galileo,” insists his lawyer Sophie Borowsky.
When he then revisited the idea in 2019, according to Borowsky, Farhadi decided “to write and direct a fiction film based on a free interpretation of Mr. Shokri’s story, which was published in media before the start of the above-mentioned workshop.”
This is a continuing story and we’ll keep you updated as it develops. You can compare Farhadi’s film and Madihzadeh’s documentary below.
For more on this topic, follow the Film & TV Observer.
