TEHRAN – A court in Iran has found two-time Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi guilty of stealing the premise for his new film, A Hero, from an earlier documentary, All Winners All Losers, made by Azadeh Masihzadeh, a former film student of Farhadi’s.
The found Farhadi guilty of violating Masihzadeh’s copyright for All Winners All Losers and of plagiarizing key elements of the documentary for his film without crediting Masihzadeh.
The ruling is binding and cannot be appealed, but a second judge will now determine Farhadi’s punishment, which can then be challenged in an appellate court.
Farhadi’s lawyer, Kaveh Rad, wrote on Instagram Tuesday that the case investigator has denied Masihzadeh’s complaint demanding a share of the film’s revenues in the case of a guilty verdict. Rad wrote that the first judge’s ruling should be “considered part of the trial process” and not the final word on the matter.
A Hero premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, winning the Grand Jury prize. It has earned around $2.5 million in theatrical release worldwide to date. Amazon Prime has rights for the film in the U.S.
Farhadi had admitted his movie, in which a man on leave from debtor’s prison, finds a bag of gold coins and decides to try and return them to their rightful owner, was based on the same true story as All Winners All Losers, which Masihzadeh developed as a student at a documentary workshop taught by Farhadi. But the director did not give Masihzadeh credit for the idea, claiming he had independently researched the story.
According to ABC News, Farhadi brought a list of newspaper excerpts to his workshop at Tehran art institution Karnameh where Masihzadeh was a student. Karnameh manager Negar Eskandarfar told ABC that all the students in that class then worked on documentaries by finding characters they were assigned and telling their stories. But Masihzadeh contends she found her story by herself, centering it around a single father who is in prison for financial reasons and who found a purse full of money during a furlough and how returning the purse affected his life.
Farhadi sued Masihzadeh for defamation and Masihzadeh countersued claiming Farhadi had plagiarized her original work.
This week, the Iranian court decided both suits in Masihzadeh’s favor, throwing out the defamation case and finding Farhadi guilty of plagiarism.
The filmmaker’s lawyer has said a guilty judgment against Farhadi is not the final verdict of the court.