Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi accused of plagiarizing lauded 2021 film A Hero
One of Farhadi’s students is suing the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker for allegedly stealing the idea from her documentary that she screened in his class
Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero was one of the most acclaimed films last year. Though the film failed to earn an Oscar nomination (two of Farhadi’s films have won Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Feature, 2012’s A Separation and 2018’s The Salesman), A Hero won the Jury Grand Prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. A Hero also ranked no. 5 on our Best Films of 2021. However, whether or not it was Farhadi’s original idea is for an Iranian court to decide.
One of the director’s former students, Azadeh Masihzadeh, filed a lawsuit against Farhadi, claiming that he stole the idea for A Hero from a documentary that she made for his class, All Winners, All Losers. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Masihzadeh and the man that inspired All Winners and A Hero are suing Farhadi for defamation.
Masihzadeh attended a workshop taught by Farhadi in 2014 at Tehran’s Karnameh Institute. During the course, students researched real-life stories for documentary subjects. While most cases came from the news, Masihzadeh found the story of Mr. Shokri, who found a bag of gold during leave from debtors prison and returned the money. The details of Shokri’s experience are very similar to the plot of A Hero.
Masihzahdeh shared the documentary with the class. Her classmates and teacher were “shocked” by the story. “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,” Masihzadeh’s classmate Rola Shamas told THR.
The stakes are very high for Masihzadeh, who risks up to two years in prison and 74 lashes should she be found guilty of a false accusation. Meanwhile, if Farhadi is found guilty, he may be required to relinquish “all income earned by the screening of the film in theaters or online” to his former student.
In a situation fit for one of Farhadi’s movies, things get more complicated. Masihzadeh claimed in 2019 that Farhadi had her sign the rights to the story over to him, which she agreed to but later regretted. “I shouldn’t have signed it, but I felt under great pressure to do so,” Masihzadeh said. “Mr. Farhadi is this great master of Iranian cinema. He used that power he had over me to get me to sign.”
Farhadi’s lawyer Sophie Borosky, who works on behalf of the A Hero’s co-producer, Memento Production, and French distributor, Memento Distribution, claims that the idea came much earlier. The Hollywood Reporter continues:
“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,” says Borowsky (Galileo chronicles the Italian astronomer’s clash with the Catholic church over his belief in science). When Farhadi revisited the idea in 2019, Borowsky claims, he 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 isn’t the first time Farhadi has found himself in disputes over originality. Another one of his students believed that he used one of his assignments as the basis for a film. However, they didn’t see it as a problem. “Mr. Farhadi is a genius filmmaker,” the student told The Hollywood Reporter. “What he did with my story is his work, not mine.”
The A.V. Club has reached out to Prime Video for comment.