Questions of ethics and motivation, the gap between public and private morality, pervade A Hero, the latest drama from acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi. The feature film, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, has been selected by Amazon for a US release in January. A favorite for the 2022 Oscar race – Farhadi has won two Oscars, for A Separation in 2012 and The Salesman in 2018, and is considered one of the most renowned filmmakers in global cinema – A Hero was shortlisted for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, but was not among the last five Oscar nominees.
The plot of A Hero follows Rahim (Amir Jadidi), a divorced father who is released from debtors’ prison for two days and stumbles upon a purse full of gold coins. Rahim initially plans to pawn the gold to pay off his debts, but when the coins turn out to be worth less than he thought, he comes up with a more complicated and convoluted plan: he hands over the money in hopes renovate his image from ex-con to selfless do-gooder. As any fan of Farhadi’s tongue-in-cheek, socio-critical dramas can guess, things don’t go according to plan.
Now, in a storyline that could have been taken from one of Farhadi’s films, the director faces two court cases in Iran linked to the film. One of the director’s former film students claims Farhadi plagiarized the story for A Hero from a documentary (titled All Winners, All Losers) she made in his class and the man both she and Farhadi claim on , that the story of A Hero is based on, it also sued the Oscar winner, accusing Farhadi of defaming his character in his fictional portrayal.
Farhadi denies all allegations and has filed a counterclaim against former student Azadeh Masihzadeh for defamation. All three criminal proceedings are running simultaneously. The court has yet to decide.
The fall’s consequences for both Farhadi and Masihzadeh are potentially grave. According to her lawyer, if the court finds Farhadi guilty of plagiarizing All Winners, All Losers for A Hero, he could be forced to turn over “all proceeds from the film’s showing in theaters or online” to Masihzadeh, and it might even face time in jail. On the other hand, if Masihzadeh is found guilty of falsely accusing and slandering Farhadi, she faces up to two years in prison and 74 lashes (corporal punishment is still part of Iran’s penal system).
spoke to Masihzadeh, her attorney (who advises her but does not represent her in court), and several others connected to the case, and asked Farhadi questions about Sophie Borowsky, an attorney for Memento Production and Memento Distribution co-producer and French distributor of A Hero.
All parties agree on the broad outlines of the story, but differ on the key facts. One thing is certain: in 2014, Farhadi taught a workshop on documentary film at the Karnameh Institute in Tehran, a local film school where Masihzadeh attended the course. For their coursework, students should research and shoot a short documentary based on the idea of ”returning lost things” and using real-life cases of people returning money they found to the rightful owners. Most of the cases were taken from news reports reported on Iranian television and national newspapers. However, Masihzadeh found an original story from a certain Mr. Shokri, an inmate in the debtors’ prison in her hometown of Shiraz in the southwest of the country. As depicted in Masihzadeh’s documentary screened at Shiraz Arts Festival in 2018, Shokri found a bag of gold during his prison leave and decided to return the money.
Masihzadeh pitched her idea for a documentary about Shokri’s story to Farhadi and the rest of the film class, in which she outlined the prisoner’s story to Farhadi. THR watched and translated a video of the class and spoke to several people who were present that day.
“I remember that moment very well because we were all shocked – Mr. Farhadi was shocked too – because Azadeh’s story was so interesting and she made it all up herself,” Rola Shamas, one of Masihzadeh’s classmates, tells THR .
Azadeh Masihzadeh (right) is shooting her documentary All Winners, All Losers. Courtesy of Azadeh Masihzadeh
It is Masihzadeh’s claim that the Oscar-winning director used this story as the basis for A Hero without citing the original source or giving it due credit. In 2019, before production of A Hero had started, Masihzadeh said Farhadi called her to his office and asked her to sign a document stating that the original idea for All Winners, All Losers was his, and to give him all rights to the story. She did.
“I shouldn’t have signed it, but I felt under a lot of pressure to do it,” says Masihzadeh, who speaks from Tehran via video link, adding that she was not offered payment for signing. “Mr. Farhadi is this great master of Iranian cinema. He used this power he had over me to get me to sign.”
Farhardi’s attorney, Borowsky, notes that the document presented as evidence in the ongoing court case is legally meaningless – “Ideas and concepts are not copyrighted,” she rightly notes. But in an email response to questions from THR, she was somewhat vague as to why the director wanted a signed document of no legal value.
“Asghar Farhadi apparently wanted to clarify that he was the one who suggested the idea and plot of the documentary during the workshop,” Borowsky wrote.
For his part, Farhadi has claimed (in interviews for A Hero and through his lawyers) that the main idea for his film came much earlier.
“Mr. Farhadi found inspiration for the main theme of the story – the creation of heroes in society – based on two lines from [the] play Bertolt Brecht [Life of] Galileo,” says Borowsky (Galileo chronicles the Italian astronomer’s conflict with the Catholic Church over his belief in science). When Farhadi revisited the idea in 2019, Borowsky claimed he had decided to “write and direct a feature film based on a free interpretation of Mr Shokri’s story, which was released to the media prior to the start of the aforementioned workshop”.
Borowsky adds that Farhadi independently researched Shokri’s story but did not contact Shokri because “the film’s main character, Rahim, not only does not share any character traits with Mr. Shokri, but is in some respects the complete opposite. Therefore, there was no need to contact Mr. Shokri for research.”
The director’s research, she says, was conducted using “newspapers and other media.” She provided links to two Iranian news items, apparently posted online in 2012, which appear to describe Shokri’s story.
But Masihzadeh denies this. The only coverage of Shokri’s story, she claims, was in a local Shiraz newspaper.
“[Shokri’s] The story has never been in the national media, it has never been on TV, it has not been available online or in the public records,” says Masihzadeh. “It was a story that I found and researched myself.”
Negar Eskandarfar, the director of the Karnameh Institute, who attended the documentary workshop sessions, supports Masihzadeh’s version of events. “The All Winners, All Losers theme was provided by Azadeh himself,” she says, not Farhadi. This coincides with the memory of classmate Shamas.
“I always follow what’s happening in Cannes, so I listened when Mr. Farhadi was doing an interview [in 2021] about A Hero,” recalls Shamas. “When he gave a summary [of the film], I swear I’m frozen. I thought, ‘This is Azadeh’s documentary.’”
Shamas testified in court on behalf of Masihzadeh. However, several other students who attended the same documentary workshop signed a statement supporting Farhadi’s claims.
Farhadi’s A Hero with Amir Jadidi (far right). Courtesy of Amirhossein Shojaei/Amazon Studios
After Masihzadeh went public with her allegations, Eskandarfar said she was approached by another former alum who made similar claims regarding plagiarism of a project he completed at a workshop led by Farhadi in 2011. THR was able to speak to the student in question, who requested anonymity. While confirming that he believed Farhadi used his student project as the basis for one of his films, he said he would not be making any legal claims against him.
“Mr. Farhadi is a brilliant filmmaker and what he made of my story is his work, not mine,” he tells THR.
This dispute, he/she said, is complicated by Farhadi’s position in Iran. The two-time Oscar winner is both the most famous and the most controversial figure in Iranian cinema. His international success has garnered him widespread support and even sparked patriotic fervor in some nationalist parts of the country, but the fact that Farhadi does not openly criticize Iran’s Islamic government has led some to accuse him of tacitly silencing the country’s autocratic rulers support, or at least let them use the success of his films to promote the regime internationally.
“Some consider him a hero, others a traitor,” says Farhad Payar, a German-Iranian actor and producer. “But he’s a tightrope walker trying to work within the system to keep his films going.”
Whatever the legal outcome of the A-Hero cases (a decision could be “tomorrow, it could be next year,” notes Masihzadeh’s lawyer), Farhadi’s reputation may already have been damaged. As the headline of an Iranian news site put it: “Asghar Farhadi: Yesterday’s Hero, Today’s Thief!”
This story first appeared in the March 23 issue of magazine. Click here to login.