Asghar Farhadi is being accused of plagiarism over his latest film A Hero, which jointly won the Grand Prix at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
The allegation comes from one of the award-winning Iranian director's former students.
Azadeh Masihzadeh filed a lawsuit against Farhadi, claiming he stole the premise for A Hero from a documentary that she presented in his class called All Winners, All Losers.
An Iranian court is now going to decide the validity of the claim. If Masihzadeh wins the lawsuit, Farhadi is likely to be forced to hand over all income earned by the screening of the film in cinemas and online. He could even face time in prison.
However, if the court decides Masihzadeh was falsely accusing the director, she could be sentenced to up to two years in prison and be subjected to 74 lashes.
A Hero, which was shortlisted for the Oscars 2022 but didn't receive a nomination, tells the story of Rahim, a divorced father on leave from a debtor’s prison, who returns a bag of money he finds in the hopes of rehabilitating his public image.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Farhadi taught a documentary filmmaking workshop in Tehran’s Karnameh Institute in 2014. Masihzadeh was enrolled in the class.
As part of the workshop, the students were tasked with researching and shooting a documentary based on the theme of “returning lost things”.
While most of the students based their projects on news cases reported in Iranian media, Masihzadeh presented an original story she found.
Her documentary, which was screened at the Shiraz Arts festival in 2018, revolved around an inmate in a debtor’s prison in Shiraz who decided to return a bag of money he found.
Masihzadeh outlined the story in Farhadi’s workshop in 2014.
“I remember that moment very well because we were all shocked — Mr Farhadi was shocked as well — because Azadeh’s story was so interesting and she’d come up with it all herself,” one of Masihzadeh’s fellow students, Rola Shams, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Masihzadeh said Farhadi used the story she found as the premise for A Hero without giving her due credit. The documentarian says she was called into Farhadi’s office in 2019, before production on A Hero began, and was pressured into signing a document that claimed the original idea of All Winners, All Losers belonged to Farhadi.
“I shouldn’t have signed it, but I felt under great pressure to do so,” Masihzadeh told The Hollywood Reporter. She also noted that she was not offered payment for signing over the story rights to Farhadi.
“Mr Farhadi is this great master of Iranian cinema. He used that power he had over me to get me to sign.”
Farhadi, whose films A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016) won Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, rejected allegations of plagiarism.
His lawyer, Sophie Borowsky — a legal representative for Memento Production and Memento Distribution, co-producer and French distributor of A Hero — said the document had no legal merit.
“Asghar Farhadi apparently wanted to make clear that he was the one who proposed the idea and the plot of the documentary during the workshop,” she wrote in an email to The Hollywood Reporter.
According to Borowsky, Farhadi decided to write and direct A Hero based on a free interpretation of Shokri’s story, “which was published in media before the start of the above-mentioned workshop”.
She also noted that the main character of A Hero, Rahim, “not only does not share any character traits with Mr Shokri but also, in some aspects, he is the polar opposite. Therefore, there was no need to contact Mr Shokri for research.”
Instead, Farhadi based his research on “newspapers and other outlets”, Borowsky said.
Since Masihzadeh has come forward with her accusations, another of Farhadi’s former students has also claimed the lauded Iranian filmmaker plagiarised a project he presented at a 2011 workshop.
However, he noted he will not be taking legal action. Speaking anonymously, he said: “Mr Farhadi is a genius filmmaker and what he did with my story is his work, not mine.”
