The double Oscar winner’s film A Hero won the grand prix at Cannes in 2021 but was the subject of an alleged copyright infringement brought by a former student
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has been cleared of charges of plagiarism over his film A Hero brought by one of his students, the agency representing him said on Wednesday.
The film, about a prisoner in the Iranian city of Shiraz, won the grand prix at the Cannes film festival in 2021.
Continue reading...Director and grand prix winner at last year’s Cannes festival for A Hero was sued by former student for using story from her documentary without credit
Asghar Farhadi, the Oscar winning director of A Separation and The Salesman, has been indicted in a plagiarism case brought by one of his former students, who had claimed he took the idea for his 2021 film A Hero from a documentary she had made for a film class.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Azadeh Masihzadeh brought the case after Farhadi had earlier sued her for defamation; in both cases the courts ruled in Masihzadeh’s favour. The case will now pass to a second judge whose ruling will decide whether or not Farhadi will be convicted. This can then be appealed.
This article was amended on 5 April 2022. It had been originally stated that Asghar Farhadi was convicted of the crime, following widespread misinformation, but has now been changed to reflect that he has been indicted and a trial will decide the outcome.
Continue reading...He has been detained at airports and told never to return to Iran. But the director, who could be about to win his third Oscar, refuses to be silenced about outrages in his own country – and in the west
Withdrawing your film from the Oscars would be career suicide for most directors, but in November Asghar Farhadi appeared to do precisely that. Shortly after Iran’s state-controlled film board put his movie, A Hero, up for the best international feature Oscar, Farhadi released a statement on Instagram saying he was “fed up” with suggestions in Iranian media that he was sympathetic to the country’s hardline government. “If your introduction of my film for the Oscars has led you to the conclusion that I am in your debt,” he wrote, “I am explicitly declaring now that I have no problem with you reversing this decision.”
Farhadi, it could be argued, can afford to make such a gesture. He has already won two international feature Oscars – for A Separation in 2012 and The Salesman in 2017 – and many more awards besides (A Hero won the Grand Prix at Cannes last year). Such achievements inevitably convey national hero status. At the same time, he seems to have trodden a careful line when it comes to his country’s oppressive regime. Other Iranian film-makers, such as Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, have paid a heavy price for criticising aspects of Iranian society, from prison sentences and house arrests to travel bans. Farhadi seems to have been spared similar treatment. Hence the accusations that he was “pro- government”.
Continue reading...Julia Ducournau has became the second woman ever to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Her triumph is a suitably rock’n’roll ending for this year’s festival
Cannes let rip a punk power chord of glorious mischief by giving the Palme d’Or to Julie Ducournau’s gonzo genderqueer body-horror shocker Titane, and the jury and the movie’s many fans will have savoured the delicious applecart-upsetting thrill of it all. It’s the biggest épat since Lars Von Trier won it for Dancer in the Dark — and, importantly, it’s an award that makes Julie Ducournau only the second female Palme-winner in the festival’s history, since Jane Campion.
I must admit I was not a fan of Titane, being in my view not the best movie in competition, and not the best film that Ducournau has directed — being less interesting than her first film, the more complex and more shocking Raw. But I’m an enormous fan of challenging the consensus and overturning the tyranny of anaemic good taste, and perhaps there’s something in the perennial stateliness of cinéma that cries out to be trolled, a bit. Tonight Titane put its steel toe-capped boot through the origami flower of received wisdom. And there’s something refreshing in that.
Continue reading...Plot holes trip up the Iranian director’s drama of a slippery man’s desperate efforts to trick his way out of debtors’ prison
Asghar Farhadi has made a tangled film about the tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive, in that calmly observant, realist yet information-withholding style with which this director made his name. In way, A Hero is a slice-of-life story, in which the “i”s and the “t”s are not necessarily dotted and crossed like a regular screenplay; it has the unsatisfactory, unclear messiness that real life has. There is plenty of interest here - and yet I have to admit to slight reservations about the melodramatic contrivances, which stretch credulity a little.
A Hero is a film that works because of a clever and subtle performance from Amir Jadidi as Rahim, a divorced father who has just been released from jail on a two-day parole, having been imprisoned for debt. He is a man with a bright yet strange, desperate smile, like one of the poor relations in Dickens. He is looking forward to being reunited with his girlfriend, his supportive sister and his beloved son – a gentle, sensitive boy with a speech impediment. Rahim is a man who believes that some sort of charming niceness might still get him get out of a jam. But he has a very specific plan for cancelling his prison sentence. His girlfriend has found a handbag in the street containing what appear to be gold coins: if they could sell them to a gold dealer, might that not raise enough for a deposit to persuade his creditor to forgive the debt?
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