Did the Oscar-Winning Director Asghar Farhadi Steal Ideas?

Read in Farsi | به فارسی بخوانید

Azadeh Masihzadeh’s family owned a VCR, a rare possession in their neighborhood in Shiraz, a city in the south of Iran. Using long cables, her father connected their machine to the televisions of seven other households, so they could watch, too. At night, after her father chose a movie, Masihzadeh, the eldest of three children, rode her bike down their alley to alert the neighbors. She honked her bike horn once if it was a foreign movie. If it was an Iranian film, she honked twice.

Masihzadeh learned English by watching these movies, and, when she was eighteen, she became an English instructor, teaching her students the language through dialogue from films. To practice greetings, she told them to act out the moment in “The Matrix” when Neo says, “It’s an honor to meet you,” and Morpheus replies, “No, the honor is mine.” If her students didn’t say their lines with enough feeling, she made them do it again. “They would get so angry at me,” she said. “One student told me, ‘You are a teacher, not a director, what are you doing? We are not your actors.’ ” She thought the student had a point, and she began saving money to make her first short film, a silent portrait of a boxing match. She completed it in 2013, when she was thirty-four, and it was accepted by more than a dozen film festivals.

The following year, she learned that Asghar Farhadi was holding a filmmaking workshop at the Karnameh Institute of Arts and Culture, a prestigious cultural center in Tehran. Farhadi, who is fifty, is the only director in the twenty-first century to have won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film twice. After his first Oscar, for “A Separation,” in 2012, Time named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. The English director and playwright Mike Leigh has described Farhadi, whose dramas focus on lies that reverberate through middle-class families, as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Farhadi has an extraordinary ability to shift among different characters’ perspectives, so that each character, even when committing acts of violence or deception, seems moral and reasonable. “The drama comes from making very small mistakes,” he has said. “Very specific mistakes. Which is the core of the story for me.”

Masihzadeh was one of eighteen students admitted to the workshop, which cost the equivalent of roughly fourteen hundred dollars—the most expensive class the Karnameh Institute had ever offered. At the first session, the institute’s director was surprised when Farhadi announced that the workshop would be about documentaries. Farhadi brought in news articles about people who had been celebrated as heroes after they found lost money or a valuable item and chose to return it, rather than to keep it for themselves. He split the class into small groups, and instructed each group to report on one of the stories. He said he wanted to explore how a person gains the status of a hero—a subject he had been thinking about since college, when he saw “Life of Galileo,” the Bertolt Brecht play, which includes the line “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

Masihzadeh, who came from Shiraz for the workshop, taking an eighteen-hour bus ride, tried to join two different groups, but she felt excluded from both. Rola Shamas, a student who video-recorded every session of the workshop, told me, “There was this unspoken competition,” because the students expected that Farhadi might pick someone from the class to work on his crew. Masihzadeh “was a bit of a black duck,” Shamas said. “She didn’t play games. She was naïve, because she was not a city girl.”

Masihzadeh received permission from Farhadi to work alone and to find her own story. To keep her expenses down, she looked for ideas in Shiraz. A friend’s aunt said she’d seen a local TV report about an inmate who, on leave from prison, had found a bag of money and returned it. His name was Mohammadreza Shokri, and he had been in prison for five years for a debt. Masihzadeh couldn’t find any information about the story online, so she went to the office of the TV station and asked a reporter there to show her the segment.

One of the class videos captures Masihzadeh presenting her idea to Farhadi. She speaks with a half smile, delighted by the details. When she explains that she has received approval from the authorities to film inside the prison, Farhadi, a small man who talks in a soft, steady voice, tells her, “So your job is to go to Shiraz.”

Nearly three months later, Masihzadeh showed part of her documentary to the class. Farhadi complimented her on her ambiguous portrayal of Shokri. But he seemed less pleased with the rest of the class. They had been told that all their documentaries would be edited into a group film, and they had expected that Farhadi’s name would appear in the credits. Farhadi told them, “My name won’t be in it at all. This is your work.”

“Can we at least thank you?” Masihzadeh asked.

“The drama comes from making very small mistakes,” Farhadi has said, of his films.

Photograph by Filip Van Roe / eyevine / Redux

Farhadi didn’t answer, except to say that he hadn’t liked it when a student’s film had listed “Asghar Farhadi” in the credits in larger letters than the title.

At the next class, two months later, Masihzadeh showed the final part of her film, a chronicle of her search for the woman who claimed the money that Shokri had found. Masihzadeh finally locates the woman in a rural valley, eight hours from Shiraz. But, when Masihzadeh meets her, it’s unclear whether she ever lost—or claimed—the money, or if Shokri and the prison concocted the story of his good deed in order to create positive publicity for the prison, which Shokri said had executed a girl on the day that he discovered the money.

Farhadi told the class that Masihzadeh’s documentary showed the importance of layering revelations until the viewer reaches a “beautiful point” where the different pieces fit together. “You let this case go,” he told her. “You let it get edited.”

Although the workshop was supposed to have ten classes, spread out over nearly a year, Farhadi told the students that he was ending it after five sessions. “What did you learn from this class?” he asked them.

“Your style and modus operandi,” one replied.

Though Masihzadeh had been disappointed on hearing that the class would focus on documentaries, she said she had thought, “Definitely Mr. Farhadi will tell us something about writing scripts for feature movies that I will be able to use.”

“What was that?” Farhadi asked her.

“The most interesting stories are within and around us,” she said. Making her film, she’d realized that people who had seemed honest when she interviewed them had actually been concealing the truth.

“Yes!” Farhadi said. “They themselves don’t realize that they lie.”

Toward the end of class, Farhadi asked the students to raise their hand if they wanted to become feature filmmakers. Everyone put a hand in the air. “I have a suggestion for all of you,” he said. “First, make a full documentary. . . . Spend your time on it, about six months or a year. Don’t show the documentary to anyone. Write your script based on the documentary. Now you know the characters. This way, your hand is fuller.” He told them, “It is possible that I will do it myself.” He said he might dispatch a group of researchers to make a documentary, and then, after a period of time, perhaps five years, he would “write a script based on it, out of its heart.”

Four years after the workshop, a final cut of the group project had not been completed. The students had hoped that a professional editor would work on the film, but instead Farhadi had selected a student from the workshop named Vahid Sedaghat, who was given all the students’ rough footage. Negar Eskandarfar, the director of the Karnameh Institute, told me, “The students were so disappointed with the process. They felt that Mr. Farhadi had abandoned the workshop.”

With permission from Eskandarfar and Farhadi, Masihzadeh hired her own editor and submitted her documentary to film festivals. At the Shiraz Film Festival, in 2018, her movie, which she titled “All Winners, All Losers,” won the Special Jury Prize. “I will definitely, definitely continue making documentaries, because I feel it is part of my life,” she said as she accepted the award.

Masihzadeh said that, after her documentary was nominated for the best-research award at another Iranian festival, a woman from the Bamdad Institute, an educational center in Tehran run by Farhadi’s wife, called her and said that the class film would be completed after all, and that the first segment would be Masihzadeh’s documentary. But, the woman added, if she continued screening her documentary at festivals, it would not be included. According to Masihzadeh, she asked if Farhadi’s name would appear in the credits, and the woman said yes. Masihzadeh immediately agreed to stop showing her film. She withdrew it from a festival in Italy. Eskandarfar, who had been an executive producer of “A Separation,” recalled that Masihzadeh was “very, very excited, because she felt that bigger things were going to happen.”

In 2019, Masihzadeh moved to Tehran and founded a short-film distribution company. When she learned that Farhadi was holding a workshop at the Bamdad Institute, she decided to enroll, since the class would be focussed on screenwriting. On the first day of the workshop, Farhadi asked the students to introduce themselves. Mohammadreza Shirvan, a student sitting next to Masihzadeh, told me, “Farhadi paused when he saw her.” Shirvan introduced himself next, but, he said, “I noticed that Mr. Farhadi was not really paying attention to what I had to say, and he went back to Azadeh and asked her, ‘Are you commuting from Shiraz?’ ” Throughout the workshop, it seemed to Shirvan that Farhadi was more interested in Masihzadeh than in the other students.

At one of the last classes, in August, 2019, Farideh Shafiei, an administrator at the institute, told Masihzadeh that Farhadi wanted to meet with her in the institute’s main office, an open room with a balcony overlooking the city. Farhadi’s wife, Parisa Bakhtavar, a director, was in the room. Farhadi invited Masihzadeh to sit at a desk and then told her that he was working on a new film, called “A Hero,” which was set in Shiraz.

According to Masihzadeh, Farhadi complimented her on her Shirazi accent and asked if she might want to act in his film. “I asked him, ‘Me?’ ” Masihzadeh said. “An actress?” She said she had no acting talent; when watching her documentary, she cringed when she heard her own voice. But she said she would be thrilled to work as an assistant, perhaps scouting locations in Shiraz. She and Farhadi discussed her knowledge of the city, and then, she said, Shafiei put a typed piece of paper on the desk. Masihzadeh assumed it would be a contract formalizing her job, but the paper said:

I ____, daughter of ____, holder of National I.D. No. ____, residing at ____, herewith, in full physical and mental health, and with utter consent, declare that the documentary film “All Winners, All Losers,” which was produced between 2013 and 2019, is based on Mr. Asghar Farhadi’s proposal and idea that he shared in his documentary-filmmaking workshop.

Shafiei gave her a new sheet of paper and told her to rewrite the statement, filling in the blanks, and then sign it.

For a moment, Masihzadeh said, she felt as if she couldn’t breathe: “I raised my hand and said, ‘Mr. Farhadi, can we perhaps speak about this?’ He said, ‘Well, sign for now and write down your National I.D. correctly so we can buy you a plane ticket to Shiraz.’ ”

She asked him, “Mr. Farhadi, is ‘A Hero’ related to my documentary?”

He told her he had written his film before she made hers, she said.

When she continued to hesitate, he said that he had been teaching all day—he was tired, and she was wasting three people’s time. “He kept repeating that it was a simple paper between us,” she said.

Masihzadeh began copying the statement, but her hand was shaking and she kept making mistakes. When she finally completed and signed it, she said that Shafiei told her, “Please leave. Mr. Farhadi is quite tired.” (Farhadi and Shafiei dispute Masihzadeh’s account of the meeting. Farhadi told me that, because there are so many rumors in the world of Iranian cinema, he’d wanted a statement clarifying the origin of the idea, so there would be no misunderstandings. Shafiei said that the conversation was so friendly that, after Masihzadeh left, Bakhtavar said, “Such a nice girl.”)

Shirvan, Masihzadeh’s classmate, was planning to drive her home that day. “I remember her crying as she entered the car,” he told me. When they were stopped at a red light, Masihzadeh began recounting what had happened, saying that Farhadi was her idol. “I told her, ‘If I were in your position, I would have done the same thing,’ ” Shirvan said.

The next morning, Masihzadeh went to the Karnameh Institute to tell Eskandarfar, its director, what had happened. “It was as if she had been struck by trauma,” Eskandarfar told me. “Her hands were trembling.” Eskandarfar added, “It crossed my mind that Farhadi would want to use her documentary.”

The next week, Masihzadeh came to the Bamdad Institute before class. “I said, ‘Mr. Farhadi, I want to tell you that the idea and the plot of my documentary are mine,’ ” she said. “He answered, ‘O.K.’ And I asked him, ‘So you agree?’ He said, ‘O.K.’ ”

According to Masihzadeh’s account, which Farhadi says is false, she asked if they could revise the statement she’d signed, but he told her that this could serve as a lesson, and that one day she’d thank him: the next time someone put a paper in front of her to sign, she should get a lawyer, to avoid stress. He said it was clear that she was anxious and not sleeping—he saw circles under her eyes. Now he needed to think twice about whether she should work on his film.

She asked for permission to sit down. When he granted it, she sank into a chair and began crying. She said that Farhadi was smoking and didn’t look her way. When he finished his cigarette, he walked out of the room.

A year later, in September, 2020, Masihzadeh was in Germany, visiting her sister, a landscape architect, when a friend called her and told her that Farhadi was shooting a movie in Shiraz. She immediately booked a flight back to Tehran. She dropped off her luggage at her apartment, put some clothes into a backpack, and took a flight to Shiraz. She wondered if Farhadi had tried to call her but hadn’t been able to get through, because she’d been in Europe. Mostly, though, she said, “I just wanted to ask him, ‘Why did you take my signature? Did you put all these questions into my head just so you could make your film? Is that the way you are teaching me?’ It is very painful.”

The friend said that Farhadi was shooting at a school on Ghasro Dasht Street. There are several schools on the road with the same name. Masihzadeh’s mother drove her to each one. When they got to the last school, the front door was partly open. Masihzadeh walked into a courtyard, where actors were dressed as teachers, and told a crew member that she wanted to speak with Farhadi. Masihzadeh said that the crew member went inside but returned saying that Farhadi didn’t know anyone with Masihzadeh’s name. She assumed that her name had been mispronounced and said it again, louder. Eventually, Sedaghat, the student whom Farhadi had selected to edit the class project, came outside. He was now working on Farhadi’s crew. He told her that Farhadi was busy and suggested that she call his assistant to schedule an appointment.

Masihzadeh considered Sedaghat her friend, and she asked him if the movie they were filming was similar to her documentary. According to Masihzadeh, Sedaghat responded that he didn’t remember her documentary, and, when she reminded him of its story, he said that he hadn’t been given the script of “A Hero.” (Sedaghat told me, “I don’t remember having that conversation,” and disagrees with Masihzadeh’s account of what happened in the courtyard.) She said, “I looked around again, and I thought, O.K., this is the yard of a school, and there are actors dressed like teachers, and my documentary has no school.” She felt silly for having doubted Farhadi, and she left. She never called to schedule an appointment.

Ten months later, “A Hero” had its world première, at the Cannes Film Festival. In interviews, Farhadi explained that he had tried to cast people who were not professional actors, because he wanted to go beyond realism and make the film look “exactly like life.” He said, “I thought it should be closer to a documentary.”

Masihzadeh asked a few friends who were at Cannes to call her after watching the film. They reported that it was about a prisoner in Shiraz named Rahim. When Rahim is on a leave from prison, where he’s been incarcerated for a debt, his girlfriend gives him a bag of gold that she found on the street, and he returns it to the owner, a mysterious woman. A few lines in “A Hero” are nearly identical to remarks that Shokri, the subject of Masihzadeh’s documentary, makes. Like Shokri, Rahim is a thin, fragile-looking man who is divorced with one child, works as a painter in the prison, has a family member with a speech impediment, and moves through the world passively, with a hapless smile. “Even when I am so angry, I smile,” Shokri had told Masihzadeh. In interviews, Farhadi said that he instructed the actor playing Rahim to “put on that broken smile whenever possible.” Farhadi told the actor, “When the character has more problems, smile more.”

Mohammadreza Shokri, who was featured in Masihzadeh’s documentary.

Photograph courtesy of Azadeh Masihzadeh

Masihzadeh asked her friends to pay close attention to the credits of “A Hero.” She said, “If in the middle somewhere, in very small letters, he had thanked ‘a student from my workshop in 2014,’ I would be quiet forever.” But there was nothing.

On Instagram, some of Masihzadeh’s friends posted synopses of her documentary along with the hashtag #AHero and tagged her; people began reposting the messages. Masihzadeh shared about twenty of these posts. The Iranian Web site Café Cinema, which publishes movie reviews and news, ran a short article about the possibility that “A Hero” was based on Masihzadeh’s documentary. “While Farhadi was busy with press interviews and the red carpet in the South of France,” the article said, filmmaking students had “mentioned another person as a ‘hero’ and considered her the cause of these successes.”

At Cannes, when asked by BBC Persian about the origins of the movie, Farhadi said that he’d held a workshop that had “research purposes.” When writing the script, he continued, he’d integrated elements from each news story that his students had investigated: “For example, from the person in Shiraz, I chose to film in Shiraz—although the character is completely different from that Shirazi character,” he said. In an interview with the Hollywood news site Deadline, he reiterated that “ ‘A Hero’ was not inspired by a specific news item.” In other interviews, he said that for years he had been thinking about the ways in which heroes feel trapped by societal expectations. “In Iran, someone is ready to lose everything to retain their reputation,” he said. “The serenity and sense of confidence that comes from knowing you have a good reputation is such that, in order to maintain that, you end up in an ambivalence about your own life.”

An Iranian film called “The Cow,” about a man who mourns his dead cow so passionately that he begins to act like it, is often credited with saving Iranian cinema. After the revolution, in 1979, movie production nearly ceased—cinema was seen as a corrupting, decadent force from the West—and thirty-two movie theatres in Tehran were shuttered, many of them burned down. But, after watching “The Cow,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was reportedly impressed by the educational potential of Iranian films. (It helped that “The Cow,” made a decade before the revolution, dealt with poverty under the Shah.) In Khomeini’s first speech after returning from exile, he said, of his regime, “We are not opposed to cinema,” only to “the misuse of cinema.” Movie theatres hung banners with Khomeini’s picture and the words “We are not opposed to cinema.” The government began working to establish a new movie industry, which would adhere to Islamic values and avoid sensitive social and political subjects that one member of the government described as “circles of perturbation.”

Farhadi, who grew up in central Iran, the son of a wholesale grocer, was seven years old during the revolution; two years later, he saw “The Cow.” “It changed my childhood world,” he told me, on a Zoom call in July, from his home, in Tehran. “I realized that there is nothing more beautiful for me than the medium of film.” Nearly all the older kids on Farhadi’s street fought in Iran’s war with Iraq, which began a year after the revolution and lasted eight years. One of his friends lied about his age in order to enlist. Not long afterward, the friend’s dead body was carried through town in a procession for martyrs. The revolution and the war created an “atmosphere where everything was solid and literal, the reality was in your face—there was no fantasy,” Farhadi said. “The only way that I could escape all this was cinema.”

Farhadi studied theatre at the University of Tehran, writing his thesis on the difference between a moment of silence and a pause in the work of Harold Pinter. “The main trait of his characters is that they say certain things to avoid saying what’s actually in their heart,” Farhadi told a film scholar. “And, for those of us who grew up in Iranian society, this is very tangible.”

In 1994, when Farhadi was twenty-two, he directed a play called “Car Dwellers” for a student festival. The play had been written by Ali Khodsiani, a fellow-student. Khodsiani told me that he was dismayed when he saw a bulletin for the performance which listed Farhadi as the author. He confronted Farhadi, who said that the credit was a mistake. But he said that Farhadi also told him, “Please do not speak out now, because I got engaged to Parisa, and we are going to get married. I’ve told Parisa that I’ve written this play myself. If she finds out that I lied to her in the first days of our lives, our relationship may break down.” Several months later, Farhadi directed the play again, at a theatre in Tehran. Khodsiani was upset when he saw the poster: this time, although Khodsiani was credited as the author, Farhadi, who had made revisions to the play, was listed as the “rewriter.” (Farhadi said that he never claimed to be the author, and added, “I don’t understand why he’s telling this fake story.” A friend of both men at the time, who witnessed them fighting, told me, “What Mr. Khodsiani said is the truth.”)

Farhadi wrote for state television and radio for several years and, in his early thirties, began working on his first feature film. Abbas Jahangirian, an author and a playwright, said that at a meeting with Farhadi he told him about a story he was writing: a lovelorn young man, working as an apprentice to a snake catcher, is bitten on the finger by a poisonous snake. They decided to work on a movie version, which Jahangirian began researching. Jahangirian was waiting to receive a contract before starting a script, but he didn’t hear from Farhadi again. In 2003, Jahangirian served as a judge at an Iranian film festival where Farhadi’s first feature, “Dancing in the Dust,” was screening. “I saw that this is the same story with a little change and without my name!” Jahangirian wrote me. He gave an interview to a newspaper, saying that he was “distressed and astonished.” Afterward, Farhadi apologized to Jahangirian, and added his name to a version of the film that was broadcast on TV. (Farhadi said that he’d heard the story from one of his co-writers, and hadn’t realized the original source.) Jahangirian wrote that, despite never receiving money for the film, “I did not protest, and I will not protest, because Farhadi has mentioned the name of my country many times in prestigious international festivals. . . . For me, national interests are more valuable than personal interests.”

Farhadi’s next movie, “Beautiful City,” which came out in 2004, was about an eighteen-year-old who, after killing his girlfriend, faces execution unless his friend and his sister can persuade the victim’s family to forgive him. “It was the first time I became aware of a very important sentence, which has affected all of my films,” Farhadi told me. “The classic tragedy is a battle between good and evil. But in ‘Beautiful City’ the story is a battle between good and good—and we don’t know which side we want to win. We have an affinity for both sides.”

Mani Haghighi, an Iranian director who had recently gained international recognition for his first feature film, told me that, when he saw “Beautiful City,” “I was just devastated. I was weeping. I was shaking. It was a shattering experience.” He invited Farhadi, whom he’d never met, to a gathering at his house. After the other guests left, Farhadi shared an idea for a new film, about a middle-class mother who suspects her husband of having an affair. Haghighi made a few structural suggestions. “At this point, it’s, like, two in the morning, and Asghar said, ‘Hang on, do you have some paper?’ ” Haghighi told me. “And he started jotting down these ideas.” Farhadi stayed until the early morning and then, after going home to sleep, came back later that day. They worked this way for eight months, until they’d finished the script. Haghighi told me, “The day we met was the day we started writing. It was like love at first sight—it really was.”

Amir Jadidi, as Rahim, in Farhadi’s “A Hero.” Masihzadeh alleged that Farhadi based the character on Shokri.

Photograph by Entertainment Pictures / Alamy

The film, called “Fireworks Wednesday,” premièred in 2006 and won three awards at the Fajr International Film Festival, in Tehran. Farhadi directed it, and he and Haghighi shared the writing credit. The movie explores the way that, in a marriage, lying can become normalized, as if it were the only way to maintain stasis. After “Fireworks Wednesday,” Farhadi came to Haghighi with a new idea: a group of middle-class friends go on a seaside vacation, and one of them, an enigmatic woman, disappears. Haghighi said that Farhadi proposed that they write the film together, and that Haghighi direct it. But Haghighi was underwhelmed by the plot. “What I was presented with was the nucleus of the story, a detective story, and I kept saying, ‘Asghar, what is interesting about this? I don’t get it.’ ”

Haghighi said that they developed the idea during the next two months, meeting nearly every day to talk and write. (Farhadi recalls discussing the idea for only a day or two.) In the process, the woman’s disappearance—and her companions’ frantic attempts to account for it—became a riveting portrait of a culture in which telling the truth is not always a viable option. “I think Asghar realized this was going to be a really great film, and he sort of took it back, which was fine with me,” Haghighi said. Haghighi ended up acting in the movie, called “About Elly,” and was not credited as a writer.

The lead role was played by Golshifteh Farahani, who had recently become the first actress based in Iran to act in a Hollywood film since the revolution, playing Leonardo DiCaprio’s love interest in Ridley Scott’s “Body of Lies.” Iran’s intelligence service launched an investigation into whether she had broken the law, both by participating in a Hollywood film and by letting herself be seen in public without a hijab. She was interrogated several times and faced the possibility of being banned from working in Iran. Before filming “About Elly,” she, like many actors in Iran, had to sign a contract stating that, if the government halted the shooting or the production of the film because of her participation in it, she would be liable for the costs.

After shooting was completed, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance blocked the film from screening at festivals. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the head of Iran’s government at the time, reversed the ban; he later said it was “not fair that a film be condemned by the mistake of one actress.” (Javad Shamaqdari, then Iran’s deputy minister of cinema, told me that one of the movie’s producers had come to him for help.) Farahani, worried about threats to her freedom, went into exile in Paris. “I was the first actress who really left like that, and I was being battered by the people, by the government,” she told me. “There was no solidarity from anyone in the business. It was like when you want to lapidate someone, and everyone just gets another stone to throw.”

She planned to reunite with the cast of “About Elly” at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, but she had to walk the red carpet alone. (She said that Farhadi wanted it this way, which Farhadi denies.) Farhadi and the other members of the cast arrived after her and took pictures together. She was humiliated, and spent the evening trying to hold back tears. She wondered if “maybe deep inside Farhadi wanted to punish me for causing the movie trouble,” she said. “Or maybe he wanted to pretend to punish me, in order to show that he was on the right side, according to the government—because I took the veil off, and I was the bad girl who everyone was insulting.” She added, “The irony is that my interrogators didn’t manage to make me feel guilty. But Farhadi managed to do that. He made me believe that by leaving Iran, by not wearing a head scarf, I had done something terrible.”

She said that Farhadi, after ignoring her publicly, spoke with her at a hotel in Berlin: “He asked me to write an apology to the Supreme Leader, saying that I had dreamed of the Imam Ali—and the imam told me to apologize for what I did—and then they would let me back into Iran.” She continued, “It was a complete mindfuck. First he hates me and ignores me, then he says he is concerned about me—but in this unbelievable way, that I should have a dream where my sins are washed away—so you don’t know what you are dealing with, really.” (Farhadi says that he never asked her to apologize.)

Farahani described Farhadi as a vasat baz, a person who plays the middle—a concept so prevalent that one popular Iranian late-night talk show names a “Vasat Baz of the Week.” “He is clearly not part of the dictatorship, but he is making deals with that dictatorship,” she said. “And yes, sure, all artists have to do that to be able to work and live and breathe there—but to what extent? Living in a dictatorship, we all have this instinct of lying to survive, but there is a point where you can go so far that you forget what the truth is.” Some Iranian filmmakers, like Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, don’t seem capable of lying, she said. Both have been charged with “propaganda against the state,” and, this summer, they were imprisoned. But, for Farhadi, she said, “everything is a move—every step, every blink, is calculated.”

Farhadi has described writing a script as “finding a suit for a button.” The starting point is often a single image. “A Separation” began with a memory that one of his brothers had shared, of crying as he bathed their ailing grandfather. That moment, Farhadi told me, was like “a magnet that starts attracting all the experiences from the subconscious, and I gather these things, and it begins to shape the suit.” Farhadi elaborated on the image, writing an intricate story about a man whose commitment to taking care of his sick father leads to the dissolution of his marriage. The film offered another variation on what had become for Farhadi a central theme. “According to what scales, according to what system of weights and measures, can I recognize a behavior as ethical and another as not ethical?” he has said. “This is the greatest question of my life.”

“A Separation” was the first Iranian movie to win an Oscar. In an interview with an Iranian news site, Iran’s deputy minister of cinema said, “We designed, and even lobbied, for this to happen.” He hoped to fulfill a mission that Ahmadinejad, a hard-liner widely accused of violating human rights, had given him, to “internationalize Iranian cinema.” In 2009, he and other ministry officials had invited a delegation from Hollywood, including four members of the Academy’s board of governors, to visit Iran for eleven days. They put up the guests at a hotel in Tehran—on their hotel pillows, they placed rosebuds and candies—and showed them “About Elly,” which, according to one of the event’s organizers, “they talked about in amazement.” (The organizer also told an Iranian news agency that the Hollywood guests were detained at the Tehran airport, and that throughout their trip he had to hide his fear that they’d be arrested.)

After “A Separation” premièred in Iran, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, who had taken a screenwriting workshop with Farhadi in 2009, said that some of his former classmates called him to say that the movie seemed to draw from a short film that he’d made in Farhadi’s class. Pourmohammadi’s film was about a domestic worker in a middle-class home who tries to hide her job from her husband, because she knows it will insult his honor; in the end, her secret is exposed. “A Separation” has a similar plotline. “I had some expectation that a professor, if he gets a good idea from a student, will also support that student and try to help him find his way into the field,” Pourmohammadi told me. He hadn’t been credited, or even informed that a similar story would appear in the movie. “It was very paradoxical,” he said. “I still loved Farhadi, and I loved the film. It was both an honor and a betrayal.” (Farhadi had portrayed domestic work in “Fireworks Wednesday,” and he told me that, if anything, Pourmohammadi’s plot may have come from that movie.)

Not long afterward, Farhadi told Mani Haghighi that he had written a film called “The Past” and summarized the script. Haghighi was taken aback: the story was a dramatization of an episode from his own life. Years earlier, he had gone to Ontario to finalize his divorce from a woman he’d met when he was studying abroad, and the reunion had been unexpectedly tumultuous. On returning to Iran, he’d shared what had happened with Farhadi: “I told the story in minute detail—not as a narrative but as ‘I can’t believe what happened to me.’ ”

Farhadi told Haghighi that he was considering him for the lead role in the film, which would be set in Paris. “It’s weird when somebody listens to your life story and goes and writes a script about it, and the way he tells you is ‘Would you like to act in this film?’ ” Haghighi said. “That’s kind of a roundabout way of communicating something, but it wasn’t offensive to me. It was just, like, Asghar is a very strange man, extremely awkward, very defensive, and protective of his style.”

Haghighi took French classes for six months, to prepare for the role, but Farhadi decided to cast someone else. When “The Past” came out and Farhadi was interviewed by journalists, he mentioned that he’d been inspired by a friend’s anecdote, but he did not name Haghighi. “That was the moment when I just thought, Forget it,” Haghighi said. “This is just too weird. I don’t understand him. He confuses me. He’s making me uncomfortable about so many things.” Haghighi didn’t particularly care if his name was attached to the story, but he found it curious that Farhadi wasn’t saying it. “I think he has this image of himself as a solitary guy with a pack of cigarettes in an empty room writing away, like a novelist,” he said. “But, I mean, film is communal. People come together and make a film, and everyone chips in.”

Haghighi and Farhadi drifted apart. But, Haghighi said, eventually “Asghar called me out of the blue and said, ‘Mani, let’s meet.’ At this point I was, like, ‘Asghar, what do you want?’ ” He said that Farhadi laughed and explained that he was working on a film in Spain, his first without any Iranian characters, and he was struggling to capture the way that Westerners respond to infidelity. Haghighi, who has written and directed eight films, invited him to his house. But he said that he told Farhadi, “You know what? I really don’t want to collaborate with you anymore, because I always feel bad about it afterward—even though I don’t really want anything from you except that you just, like, come to me and say, ‘That was really helpful. Thank you.’ ”

Yet, as Farhadi described his concerns with the script, Haghighi became interested. “Fine, this is what we will do,” Haghighi told him. “I don’t want a contract. I don’t want money. I just want you to acknowledge that this day occurred. So we will take a picture of us in front of the whiteboard as we start writing the script together. Then, when the film comes out, and you don’t acknowledge me, and you just forget who I was, I will show you this picture. At least you will know that there was a moment when this happened.”

They took the photograph. For four months, Farhadi came over to Haghighi’s house nearly every day to write. They finished a forty-two-page treatment for the film, the notes for which are still in a box in Haghighi’s living room. The plan was that Farhadi would send a draft of the script to Haghighi, so they could continue collaborating, but Haghighi didn’t hear from him again until after the film, called “Everybody Knows,” premièred, in 2018. (Farhadi says that the script was based on a revised treatment that he worked on without Haghighi.) The film starred Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz. Haghighi was one of fourteen people, including Farhadi’s wife and daughter, thanked at the end of the credits, but he was not acknowledged beyond that. He joked to me that, though perhaps he had “a sort of Stockholm syndrome,” he didn’t care. “The question is: why not?” he said. “We wrote the treatment together, and I can prove it. I have all the documents in my house. My thing is: there’s absolutely no way I would have had this much joy and intensity and pleasure in making art. For me, there was never a sense of transaction. It was: here’s this fabulous guy who is brilliant and fun to talk to, and, when we write, it really is a beautiful experience.” He described it as “agape,” a Greek term for love that persists without the expectation of reciprocation. “I acknowledge how deeply painful it is for him to acknowledge me,” Haghighi said. “So I won’t ask him to. Fuck it.”

Taraneh Alidoosti, arguably Iran’s most distinguished actress, who has starred in four of Farhadi’s films, including “The Salesman,” which won an Oscar in 2017, said that she laughed when she saw the title “Everybody Knows,” because it seemed to speak to Farhadi’s own fears. His films portray characters who lie to protect their social status and are terrified of what people will say about them if their secrets are uncovered. She said that, for a long time, “we always laughed about it, like, ‘O.K., everything is yours, Asghar, go on with it.’ ” She added, “We are talking about a genius, but he is also a genius in the ways that he has to suck the people around him out of their ideas.” When she learned a student had claimed that Farhadi took her idea, “I said, ‘Of course. I know it. I already know it.’ ”

Most of Masihzadeh’s former classmates accused her of lying. Sedaghat, the student who had worked on the crew of “A Hero,” posted a story on Instagram saying that “the plan, idea, and process of making that documentary was completely formed by Asghar Farhadi.” He wrote, referring to Masihzadeh’s allegation, that he’d refrain from “analyzing why such behavior takes place, and the pathology of it.” Twelve students from the class signed a letter stating, “We want to strongly deny the false claim by Mr. Farhadi’s student that ‘A Hero’ is a copy of her documentary, which is a completely reverse account of the truth.”

Masihzadeh wanted to meet with Farhadi, but her message to his public-relations team went unanswered. “My hope was that everything could be solved by a very human speech,” she told me. “I just wanted him to come to me as a person and say, ‘I liked your story. But you are a student, and you should be quiet. Don’t tell anyone.’ I would say, ‘O.K., Mr. Farhadi, thank you for telling me. That’s O.K.’ ”

“A Hero” was Farhadi’s first film following Bloody November, a period of civil unrest in the fall of 2019. The government had responded to protests, sparked by rising gas prices, by killing at least fifteen hundred people. Though conservative critics have accused Farhadi of siahnamaie—a Farsi word for “showing things through a black lens”—he now came under increasing pressure from the other side, for failing to use his international platform to advocate against a government oppressing its people. At a press conference at Cannes, after the première of “A Hero,” a journalist alluded to the fact that the movie’s lead actor had previously starred in a movie financed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. “I see the actor as an actor,” Farhadi responded. “When actors go to play in a movie, they try to play the role as best they can.” The director Mohammad Rasoulof—who had been charged with creating propaganda but was not yet imprisoned—wrote on Twitter, “Dear Asghar Farhadi, according to your argument, Eichmann was just a soldier who tried to do his duty well!”

Masihzadeh was uncomfortable when critics of Farhadi latched on to her claims in order to further their own arguments. “I don’t like that people are insulting him,” she told me. “I will never insult Mr. Farhadi. I feel that he is a human being, like all other human beings, who made a mistake. I just want him to be honest with me, that’s all.”

Masihzadeh consulted a lawyer, a friend of a friend, who suggested that she contact Farhadi through Sana, an electronic portal in Iran that allows citizens to send legal notices to anyone in the country. In September, 2021, the lawyer sent a message to Farhadi saying that Masihzadeh’s intellectual-property rights had been violated. He requested “dialogue and negotiation in order to achieve peace and reconciliation,” adding, “If this friendly demand is not met, we reserve the right to use the courts.”

There was no response, but, a month later, Masihzadeh was invited to a meeting at the House of Cinema, a film guild whose leadership is controlled by the government. Manouchehr Shahsavari, the House’s chief at the time, was there, along with Farhadi’s lawyer, Kaveh Rad, and the head of the House’s arbitration council, which resolves disputes between filmmakers. Rad informed Masihzadeh that, according to Iranian law, she had committed the crime of defamation: reposting false stories, even if she hadn’t written them herself, was illegal. “It’s so simple to file a lawsuit,” he told her, according to an audio recording of the meeting. “It’s very easy.” To prevent a complaint from being filed against her in court, he said, she needed to delete her Instagram stories, which she had saved to her profile as highlights.

“A Hero” had not yet premièred in Iran. Masihzadeh’s knowledge of the film was based on reports from her friends at Cannes and on international news coverage. She told Rad she agreed that the themes of her documentary had come from Farhadi, but said she was amazed that people were saying the actual story was his, too. “It’s been four months that I’ve been trying hard to reach him,” she said. “I keep sending messages and telling everybody who I know who maybe has some contact with Mr. Farhadi to ask him to contact me.” She went on, “For me, Mr. Farhadi was the master of everything related to ethics. I don’t like to say this word, but lying is very strange.”

Shahsavari, the head of the House of Cinema, told Masihzadeh to beware—people could use her accusation as an opportunity to impugn the prestige of Iranian cinema. He reminded her of one of the last scenes of “Casablanca,” when the hero, Rick, conceals the truth by telling the husband of a woman he still loves that their romance is over, before helping them escape the Nazis.

Masihzadeh, who knew the scene well, said, “He doesn’t lie, but he doesn’t tell the truth.”

“This is what we’ve learned from cinema,” Shahsavari said. He advised Masihzadeh to think carefully about the moral implications of telling the truth: Was it right to tell someone in a loud voice that she had too many freckles on her face? Or to tell a person that her nail polish was poorly done? He said, “The difference between telling the truth and shamelessness is a very thin hair.”

The next day, it was announced that “A Hero” had been chosen as the country’s submission for the Oscars. That night, a virtual room was set up in the app Clubhouse to discuss the decision. People complained that a new generation of Iranian filmmakers was not being given the chance to rise, because, whenever Farhadi had a movie, other Iranian directors were ignored. Mehdi Asgarpour, a member of the nine-person committee that made the Oscar selection, was in the Clubhouse room, and he explained that the “people who choose the films for the Oscar in the Academy are very old, and they don’t feel like watching films.” He said that his committee’s strategy was to select whichever Iranian movie, owing to the director’s résumé, would have the best chance of being watched at all.

“Something that came up in our conversations was that there might be a complaint about Farhadi’s film,” one of the moderators of the room said.

Masihzadeh had joined the room, as had Shafiei, the Bamdad Institute administrator. Shafiei informed everyone that Masihzadeh had signed a statement saying that Farhadi had given her the idea for her film.

Masihzadeh interjected, “You were present in the room where Mr. Farhadi told me to sign this letter, do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember exactly,” Shafiei said.

“Mr. Farhadi was also in the room?”

Shafiei, avoiding the question, said, “Were you under torture when you signed the letter?”

“I just asked a question,” Masihzadeh said.

“I want to know,” Shafiei said. “Were you under torture when you signed that letter?”

Two days later, Masihzadeh was invited to a second meeting with the head of the House of Cinema, and she was relieved to learn that Farhadi would be there. But, at the meeting, Farhadi told her that, when he’d heard her story about feeling forced to sign a statement, he had been shocked. He said that he’d given each of his students a sapling. Yes, they had planted the saplings, but he had provided them with detailed instructions on where to plant them, and on how and when to water the soil. Years later, she had seen him with a piece of fruit and accused him of taking it from her. But, he told her, “it was my tree.”

Masihzadeh tried to explain why she’d felt pressured to sign the statement, but Farhadi interrupted her, saying, “This can be recorded, as you are actually accusing me, and we can legally prosecute.” He asked, “How does your conscience allow you to tell such lies about a teacher who did all these good things for you?”

“It is not a lie, Mr. Farhadi. You may have forgotten—it’s O.K.”

When she continued recounting her memory of giving her signature, he told her, “Ma’am, it seems like you are suffering from—I’m sorry, I do not want to use the word.” He said he could no longer even understand what she was saying: “You are telling a story that is so unreal.” He told her he’d associate her image with ungratefulness for the rest of his life.

After the meeting, Masihzadeh called Ghazaleh Soltani, one of only a few students from the workshop who had openly taken her side. “She was crying a lot, and she couldn’t talk,” Soltani said. “I told her to please come over, because it was not good for her to be alone.” When Masihzadeh arrived, Soltani said, “she was disintegrated. She had been waiting for months for Farhadi, whom she admired like a father, to come to her and say ‘O.K., Azadeh, I’m sorry, I did a bad thing.’ ”

Masihzadeh struggled to sleep, and she began stuttering, something that had never happened before. “My jaw and tongue weren’t in control,” she said. When Negar Eskandarfar, the director of the Karnameh Institute, heard Masihzadeh speak on the phone, she was so concerned that she invited Masihzadeh to spend the night at her house. “She wasn’t even able to say my name,” Eskandarfar told me. “She would say, ‘N-n-n-n-negar.’ ”

Eskandarfar related to Masihzadeh’s state of mind, because, while working with Farhadi on “A Separation,” as an executive producer, she, too, had felt forced to write a letter. After the film was completed, Farhadi had signed an international-distribution agreement—one that Eskandarfar says was financially favorable to him—without her knowledge. According to the original contract, Eskandarfar alone had the authority to make such a deal. When the founder of an international distributor discovered that the original contract had been breached, she sent an e-mail to Farhadi saying that “the release might be blocked.” By then, “A Separation” was a favorite to win the foreign-film Oscar. Eskandarfar felt that, to resolve the crisis, she had no choice but to write a letter stating that she transferred her rights to Farhadi—and to backdate it, so it appeared as if it had been drafted before Farhadi signed the international contract. She didn’t want to be responsible for preventing the film from receiving the recognition it deserved. “If the whole thing came crashing down, I would have to answer to history and to a whole generation,” she told me. (Farhadi disputes Eskandarfar’s account, and showed me a letter saying that she had not fully paid the investor’s portion of “A Separation.” Eskandarfar said that the payment was a separate issue; owing to sanctions placed on Iranian banks, she was delayed in transferring money.)

Eskandarfar worried that Masihzadeh might break down. “I was concerned that what I went through psychologically—she would go through the same, or even worse,” she said. “When I myself was in that position, I had adopted silence.”

Masihzadeh’s mother flew to Tehran to take care of her. “I am one of those girls who is so outgoing, who likes to travel, who knows so many people,” Masihzadeh told me. But she felt abandoned by most of her friends and colleagues. Soltani said that people attacked her, too, for supporting Masihzadeh. “I think we can really study the mind and culture of Iran through this case,” Soltani told me. “We are always being humiliated throughout the world, and Farhadi gives us a sense of power and progress. I think, from the unconscious part of their mind, people just don’t want to listen to any story that might make our idol, our hero, come down.”

A few days after the second meeting with the head of the House of Cinema, Masihzadeh was asked to attend a third meeting. But, at that point, she couldn’t speak without stuttering, and she no longer believed that anything productive could come of talking to Farhadi, so she declined. A representative from the House of Cinema called her lawyer and offered the equivalent of roughly sixteen hundred dollars for Masihzadeh’s contribution to “A Hero,” which has earned more than 2.8 million dollars in theatrical releases and is now streaming on Amazon Prime, and proposed that she be listed in the credits as a member of a group of researchers. Masihzadeh turned down the offer. “When you humiliate someone by saying, ‘You are a liar, you are deluded,’ and then later say, ‘I want to credit you as a researcher,’ my response is ‘No,’ of course,” she told me. “I was not the researcher of ‘A Hero.’ I was the director of my documentary. No one came to me asking me to do research for ‘A Hero.’ ” She asked for a credit saying that “A Hero” had been inspired by her documentary, but Rad told me that, given the differences between the two films, “we could not accept this.” The House of Cinema’s arbitration council had already issued a formal decision concluding that Masihzadeh’s claim was false, an “anti-cultural move” that would interfere with “A Hero” becoming “a worthy ambassador and representative of Iranian cinema in the road of its global success.”

Masihzadeh continued reposting Instagram stories in which people remarked on the similarity between her documentary and “A Hero.” A few weeks after the House of Cinema meetings, Farhadi filed a complaint with the investigative branch of the Tehran Culture and Media Court, accusing Masihzadeh of defamation and of spreading false news. She faced up to a year in prison or seventy-four lashes. Farhadi told me that he hated the idea of bringing a criminal complaint against his student, but said that his lawyer had told him, “We have no choice, because they are spreading these dishonesties on social media.”

To prepare for the trial, Masihzadeh saw “A Hero,” which had premièred in Iran four days after her meeting with Farhadi, six times in a week. One night, as she was going through her notes for court, she remembered a piece of advice that Farhadi had given the screenwriting-workshop students: they should give their characters ordinary, recognizable jobs. She sensed that Farhadi’s favorite character in “A Hero” was the man to whom Rahim is in debt. The man articulates the thematic heart of the movie, asking why a person should be celebrated as a hero for simply returning money as opposed to keeping it. “Where in the world are people celebrated for not doing wrong?” he asks.

She realized that the creditor owns a photocopy shop with a copy machine that whirs as he talks. “Mr. Farhadi, why?” she said to herself. “Why did you choose a job like that? Do you yourself know what you did?”

In November, 2021, the investigative branch of the Tehran Media and Culture Court held its first hearing on the defamation case. Masihzadeh told me that she made sure to shower before the hearing, knowing that “they will arrest me for two or three days, until my family brings me money.” She went on, “Because of that signature, I felt that, whatever happens to me, I deserve it.” But in her first conversation with the magistrate deciding the case, she said, he told her that the statement she had signed was legally meaningless. She was still stuttering, but, after the magistrate’s remark, “little by little, I got my voice back,” she said. “I felt released.”

That day, Farhadi made the most explicit political statement of his career. In an interview with a news agency in Tehran, a pro-government filmmaker had accused Farhadi of being “both inside and outside the government,” and of “eating at everyone’s table.” On Instagram, addressing the filmmaker, Farhadi wrote, “I have nothing to do with your regressive way of thinking, and don’t need your praise and support. If the selection of my film ‘A Hero’ as Iran’s official Academy Awards submission has made you reach the conclusion that I’m under your banner, cancel this decision. I don’t care.” He went on, “Let me put it frankly: I hate you!” He said that he wished to stay in his homeland and continue making films for Iranians, but noted, “It seems that there is a great effort on all sides to discourage this love and hope, some by publishing distorted and fake memories, others by slandering and making false claims.”

Masihzadeh said that, when she read the last line, she felt, “he is mentioning me, but it is hidden. And I was not the only one who had that thought. People kept sending it to me and saying, ‘He’s saying your memories are fake.’ ”

Two weeks after the first hearing, Masihzadeh flew to Shiraz to visit Mohammadreza Shokri in prison. She had decided to make a documentary about what was happening to her, but, she said, “I was looking at it not as a film but as a document to show to the court.”

Shokri was in Adel-Abad prison, which has thousands of inmates, some of them political prisoners who have been sentenced to death. In 2020, there was an international outcry when the prison executed a wrestling champion who had protested Iran’s regime; before he died, he said that officers had tortured him, beating his legs and hands with a baton, pouring alcohol in his nose, and pulling a plastic bag over his head. (The government denied this.)

Masihzadeh, with a cameraman and a sound technician whom she’d hired, met Shokri in the prison’s visiting room, a long hall with a row of windows near the ceiling. “Hello, Ms. Masihzadeh, how are you?” Shokri said, holding his palm to his chest. It had been seven years since they’d seen each other, and during that time he’d had only one visitor, his mother. He wore an olive-green prison uniform; the stubble on his face had grayed. “I am at your service,” he told her.

They sat down at a plastic table. “I want to take you out of here right now,” she told him.

“How?” he asked, laughing.

“I have thought of some ways,” she said. “I want to take you to the cinema to watch a movie together.”

Shokri burst out laughing.

“You don’t believe me?” she asked. “We want to go to the cinema and watch a movie—will you come with us?”

“If they allow me,” he said, laughing so hard that he put his head down on the table. “I swear to God, you know better, you are just like my sister.”

She had applied for permission to take Shokri to a 10 a.m. screening of “A Hero” at a theatre in Shiraz. Shokri, whose feet were shackled, sat in a plush red seat, next to a prison guard to whom he was handcuffed. The manager of the theatre did not want customers to watch a movie alongside a prisoner, so Masihzadeh, after borrowing money from an acquaintance, had purchased every seat.

Masihzadeh hadn’t told Shokri anything about the movie in advance. When it was over, he was crying. “I’m on edge,” he told Masihzadeh in the lobby of the theatre. “The life story that happened to me . . . they came and used it with a different script.”

When Masihzadeh was making her documentary, Shokri had asked her not to film his brother, who had a disability that made it difficult for him to speak, and she had agreed. In “A Hero,” Rahim has a son with a stutter who becomes a kind of sympathy prop for a charity raising money on his behalf.

“I told you please do not show my brother’s video anywhere,” he told her, crying.

“I am truly sorry,” Masihzadeh said.

“God bless you,” he said. “My brother’s part put a lot of pressure on me.”

“Did your brother pass away, Mr. Shokri?” Masihzadeh asked.

He nodded, still crying.

“My condolences to you, Mr. Shokri,” she said. “I did not know that.”

“He has put this boy’s stuttering instead of my brother’s disability,” Shokri said. He wiped his eyes with the surgical face mask that he had worn during the movie. “Excuse me for saying this—this is really a robbery. He was not supposed to play with my dignity.”

They returned to the prison together, and, as Shokri continued to reflect on the movie, he sometimes called the prisoner Rahim, and sometimes referred to Rahim as “me.” He said, “My feeling is that Mr. Director could have at least come to visit me.” He began imagining how Farhadi might have asked his permission and then told him, “I will help you to get out of here. I will make the movie and help you to get out.” Shokri had a daughter, whom he hadn’t seen for many years. “I would have accepted,” he said.

Masihzadeh bought two textbooks about intellectual-property law. She had decided to represent herself. “Unfortunately, my life was cancelled,” she told me. “From morning to night, I was just thinking about my case and memorizing law sentences.” Often, she showed up for the hearings crying.

The case was focussed on her statements on social media, but she hoped to introduce new evidence, like video footage of the workshop. “People were telling me, ‘You have to sue Farhadi, too, so you can bring all the documents to the judge,’ ” she said. She called the secretary of the House of Cinema. “I said, ‘Excuse me, please tell Mr. Farhadi that it does not give a good impression to society when a teacher opens a case against his student. Please ask him to take it back. Otherwise I will sue him. I don’t want to, because he is my master, but I have to defend myself.’ ” She didn’t get a response.

On November 30, 2021, nearly a month after Farhadi filed his complaint, Masihzadeh lodged a counterclaim, for plagiarism, intellectual-property theft, and “illegitimate gains by fraud or abuse of privilege.” If convicted, Farhadi could face up to three years in prison and the possibility of handing over the proceeds of “A Hero” to Masihzadeh. From prison, Shokri also filed a complaint against Farhadi, for defamation and “revealing personal information and secrets,” among other allegations. He wrote that he had “granted the exclusive permission of making my real life to Ms. Masihzadeh” and had never given Farhadi permission to depict his story. He described how “A Hero” dramatized the “laryngeal problem of my brother suffering from shortness of breath while speaking”—a subject that he had told Masihzadeh not to mention under any circumstances, because he feared it would be used for “arousing pity.”

When Masihzadeh went to the House of Cinema to pick up a document for the court, she said that Shahsavari, the head of the institution, urged her to retract her complaint. She said that she would, if Farhadi took back his. But, in January, Farhadi filed a second complaint against her, this one for defamation and spreading false news by saying that she’d been coerced into signing a statement. “Why should I force her into doing this?” Farhadi said to me. “It was a very normal letter.”

Iran has not joined the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, signed by a hundred and eighty-one countries. The country has domestic copyright laws, but they are irregularly enforced, in part because few lawyers specialize in the field. Some Islamic legal scholars have questioned the legitimacy of a right to intellectual property, which is not clearly laid out by early Islamic jurists or by the Hadith, the corpus of sayings passed down from the Prophet Muhammad. Earlier this year, in an online cinema magazine, Behrouz Afkhami, a film director and a former member of the Iranian parliament, characterized the notion of copyright as a Western construct. “Anyone who thinks he has an idea that has not been discussed before usually has not read enough stories,” he said.

Masihzadeh’s documentary approaches Shokri’s story with a level of rigor and curiosity that feels anthropological and almost joyful. Farhadi’s film is seeking a different kind of truth; to observe how he takes small details from Shokri’s narrative and knits them into intersecting strands of plot is to see the process by which a story becomes art. Even a seemingly minor detail, like Rahim’s son’s speech impediment, justifies its own existence, altering the film’s moral and emotional atmosphere. In an interview at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, when asked why he’d chosen to include “that heartbreaking speech impediment, which is so instrumental to the script,” Farhadi said that he’d made the choice when he began writing. “The main character of the film is somebody who can’t make decisions,” he said. “But, at the end of the film, he makes a decision.” Rahim refuses to make a video that might help free him from prison, because it would mean exposing his son’s speech impediment to the public. “That decision makes him a hero in front of his child,” Farhadi said. “That’s why I put in this issue of the kid having a speech impediment—so he can make a decision.”

Copyright law differentiates between ideas, which cannot be owned, and the expression of ideas, which can be. Farhadi and his lawyer presented two different arguments to the court: first, that Farhadi had given Masihzadeh the idea to work on Shokri’s story, and, second, that it didn’t matter who originally found the story, because Shokri’s case had been reported in the media before Masihzadeh’s documentary, so neither of them could claim ownership of it. The court ordered the Karnameh Institute to give Masihzadeh the roughly sixty hours of videos documenting the entire workshop. Masihzadeh compressed the footage into an hour-long compilation of the moments most relevant to the case, so that the magistrate could analyze whether Shokri’s story was an established set of facts, free for anyone to interpret, or whether Masihzadeh had uncovered its contours for the first time.

In March, 2022, after numerous hearings spread over five months, the magistrate issued an eighteen-page opinion, concluding that the story had not been in the public domain. He wrote that the classroom footage showed Masihzadeh introducing the idea of Shokri’s story and explaining that there were two newspaper articles about it. Neither was available online, so Masihzadeh had borrowed old copies of the papers that Shokri kept in his prison cell. The magistrate wrote that he had searched for the articles online himself, to no avail.

The magistrate dismissed the complaints filed by Farhadi and Shokri, but he found merit in Masihzadeh’s claims, pointing to forty-four segments in “A Hero” that either resembled her documentary or drew from her research. He indicted Farhadi, for violating his student’s intellectual-property rights, and referred the case to a criminal court, to determine if Farhadi was guilty of the charge.

Eskandarfar said that one of the twelve students who had signed the statement in support of Farhadi came to her office crying. The student was worried that she could be sued for putting her name on the letter. “She was quite scared,” Eskandarfar told me. “I asked her, ‘Why did you sign that letter?’ And she said, ‘For the same reason Azadeh signed her letter: Farhadi was my teacher, and it was expected of me.’ ”

After the magistrate’s decision, Masihzadeh and I met in Istanbul, because it was safer to meet there than in Iran, where many journalists have been arrested. Although Masihzadeh’s hair was black, she immediately confessed that she’d dyed it. “My hair went completely white,” she told me. “It happened in one year.” Our first conversation lasted thirteen hours. Masihzadeh was struggling to process how she had become Farhadi’s antagonist, and she seemed bewildered by her own commitment to continuing the fight. “Sometimes I think it is not a good thing,” she told me. “Until this year, I was a very simple kind of girl.” She said that, when Farhadi first filed his criminal complaint, “I thought I would go to court and accept all the consequences and show how weak I was in front of Farhadi, how he betrayed me. I would be the person who is the victim.” She guessed that Farhadi had made this calculation, too. “But suddenly I said, ‘Why? So people can cry for me? So I can close my eyes and give all the power to him? Because it is the rule that women are weak, I should be weak?’ ”

Although the magistrate had ruled in her favor, Masihzadeh received hundreds of messages attacking her character. She was accused of being a whore, a spy, an opportunist. “It was a good opportunity for her to show her film to many people,” Sedaghat told me. “With my knowledge of her and the lies I have heard from her, I think this is what has happened.” He said that the filmmakers who supported her were jealous of Farhadi’s success.

In a statement on Instagram after the magistrate’s decision, Rad repeated the claim that Shokri’s story had been in the public domain, and, as proof, he posted links to two articles about Shokri in Iranian newspapers. Masihzadeh searched for Shokri’s story online. “I thought, Wow, they have suddenly filled the Internet with this story,” she said. (When I asked a veteran journalist in Iran how such a thing might be possible, he said, “Give me a piece of news, and I can put it on a hundred sites—it’s easy.”)

Masihzadeh was more than thirty thousand dollars in debt, after borrowing money to pay for consultations with lawyers, among other expenses. She had gone for a year with barely an income. She’d been making a short film in the north of Iran, but she said that the producer abruptly pulled out of the project, citing her case with Farhadi. (The producer could not be reached for comment.) “I wanted to confess to you that I am not powerful at all,” she told me, crying. “They are killing me in the cinema. My career is going to end.”

The international film community did not seem fazed by a decision rendered by a legal system known to be unjust and corrupt. When I met Masihzadeh in Istanbul, Farhadi had just been named a juror for the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Later, he was elected president of the Zurich Film Festival jury. “It’s like the whole world is laughing at me,” she said.

Iran’s judicial system categorizes crimes as “forgivable” and “unforgivable.” For crimes in the first category, victims can ask the state to stop the trial process if they have decided to make peace with the perpetrator. After the first hearing before the criminal court, in June, 2022, Masihzadeh said, one of Farhadi’s lawyers, a human-rights advocate who had been hired for the proceedings, suggested that she and Farhadi have a joint press conference and announce that there had been a misunderstanding. Masihzadeh said that she responded, “Please ask Mr. Farhadi to go to the press conference and confess that ‘a human makes mistakes, and I am a human being, and I made a mistake.’ Then I will take my complaint back.”

They did not reach an agreement. Farhadi gave the criminal court a nine-page chart analyzing the alleged similarities between “A Hero” and Masihzadeh’s documentary. He put each similarity in one of three categories: “news” (the detail had already been published in an article), “custom” (a character is drawing on a conventional phrase or idea, like comparing a good thing to a miracle), or “idea, plan, guidance” (the films resembled each other because he had instructed his students to adopt his cinematic approach). “Ambiguity in characterization, doubts about the authenticity of conversations and situations, changing the direction of the story, etc., are all constant elements of my work,” he wrote in a statement to the court. It seemed like a joke, he added, that he could be accused of stealing these very elements from a student.

The case has now been before the criminal court for five months, but it may be much longer before the judge reaches a decision. Mani Haghighi told me that, when he spoke with Farhadi about the case last summer, it was clear that Farhadi believed he had done nothing wrong: “He was just in shock. He told me, ‘This was my idea. I gave it to the students, and then they came back with the results.’ ” Haghighi hasn’t watched any of Farhadi’s films since “The Past,” from 2013, because he didn’t want to be asked to speak publicly about Farhadi or his work, but he said, “If you ask me—as a person who hasn’t seen either ‘A Hero’ or the documentary but just knows the guy extremely well—this is not plagiarism. Asghar is far too intelligent and interesting as an artist, as a writer, to do something like that. This is him wanting control over authorship. It’s a character flaw.”

The situation reminded Haghighi of an essay in which the American philosopher Stanley Cavell argues that King Lear’s failure is his inability to acknowledge his children, to see them for who they really are. “That’s where the tragedy takes place in ‘King Lear,’ and it’s kind of similar here,” he said. He assumed that Farhadi would win the legal case, but that the victory would not feel meaningful. He said he’d told Farhadi, “You are a successful, powerful, rich man going against a woman from Shiraz who has none of the things that you have. That’s not a victory. That’s a loss. That’s embarrassing. What you need to do is satisfy her—in the traditional, Shakespearean sense. It’s not about winning the court case. What you want is for her to feel seen and acknowledged—not that you did everything in your power not to do this one thing.”

When I spoke with Farhadi in July, he was preparing to spend several months in America, to work on a new movie. I asked him about a rumor I’d heard, that he was relocating to the U.S. permanently. The Iranian government had been punishing expressions of dissent with increasing severity, and three filmmakers had just been put in prison. “The truth is that this has placed me in a crossroads about what I should do,” Farhadi said. “On the one hand, if I make movies in Iran, my movies are so much more effective—they’re so much more powerful and more important for my people in Iran. On the other hand, if I stay and make these movies, it’s almost as if I’ve accepted the political situation and the normalization of these events, as if I’m indifferent to it.”

Farhadi had a calm, thoughtful presence, even when talking about his own anger. His eldest daughter, who was in graduate school at Pratt, in Brooklyn, was home in Tehran for the summer, and at one point she came to the computer to tell me that I’d written a book called “Getting Lost in Solitude,” a collection of three stories taken from The New Yorker and republished in Farsi—this was news to me, and it confirmed the chaotic state of copyright norms in Iran. Farhadi said that there were widespread misunderstandings about copyright law; cases dealt with the issue every year. He also said he’d read a story in “Getting Lost in Solitude” that was based in New York, and that maybe one day, if he made a film set in the city, an element of that story would come to him subconsciously and appear in his film. “I will say, ‘Yes, I read your article, and it had an effect on me,’ ” he said. “Every second, we are getting something from the environment, from talking to people, and we are not aware of this.”

He told me, speaking through a translator, that when “A Hero” had screened at Cannes they were still finalizing the credits; he’d meant to include Masihzadeh’s name, but there had been a mistake. He apologized for talking about his student at all. “It doesn’t mean she’s not a good person,” he said. “I made all my films about the fight between good and good, and I understand her. When I was young, I loved my first film—it was not a very good film, but at the time I believed, ‘This is mine.’ I can understand her feeling about her documentary.”

I repeated an observation he’d once made about the structure of his films: a small mistake sets off a series of unintended consequences, spiralling into a crisis. I asked whether this formula applied to the situation he was facing now. “Yes, I am writing notes about this issue every day, and maybe one day I will write a script about it,” he said. “On the one side, I am surprised. On the other side, I am happy, because I can say, ‘O.K., my films are realistic films.’ ”

He shared a piece of writing advice that he sometimes gives students, to convey how a set of facts can be interpreted in different ways: “Imagine that one day my friend calls and says, ‘I haven’t seen you for such a long time—I really miss you.’ We set up a meeting in a café, and we say normal things. The friend notices that the sun is bothering my eyes and offers to change seats. He says he is bored, and he’d like to go on a long trip. Then I pay for the coffee and say to myself, ‘This person never pays—why do I always have to pay for his coffee?’ Then we say goodbye.

“I have a question,” he went on. “Was there anything strange about the story I told you?”

I said no.

“Everything was very normal,” he said. “This can happen to anyone. Now imagine if that friend of mine were to leave, get into an accident, and die that same day. All those moments begin to take on different meanings. I might say to myself, ‘He was so kind—he was concerned with the sun hurting my eyes.’ And then I say, ‘I’m such a bad person for thinking about how he made me pay for his cup of coffee.’ Then I think, He said he wanted to go on a long trip. Maybe he was talking about death.”

Farhadi continued, “In my movies, it’s the same thing. When some tragedy takes place, we stack everything up like dominoes, and everything becomes a sign of something else.” He said that, when Masihzadeh came to the set of “A Hero” to see him, “she was insulted, but it was a very normal situation.” On the day that she signed the statement, he said, “it was a very simple letter, not even on letterhead—just on a plain piece of paper. But now that this whole thing has come about, it has found a different meaning for her.”

In August, the director of the Cinema Organization of Iran, a branch of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, announced that soon several filmmakers in Iran would be banned from making movies. Although there has been no official ruling, Farhadi told me he has learned that he’s on the list. He believes it may be because he ignored warnings not to screen “A Hero” at the Jerusalem Film Festival. “Different parts of the government called my assistant and other people and delivered their message,” he said.

A few weeks later, a twenty-two-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of Iran’s morality police; she had been arrested and taken to a “reëducation center” because her hijab did not properly cover her hair. On Instagram, Farhadi posted a picture of Amini in her hospital bed before she died and wrote, “We have put ourselves to sleep against this unending cruelty. We are partners in this crime.”

Protests broke out in more than ninety cities, where women took off their hijabs and burned them in the streets. A well-known actress dared to appear on Iranian television without her hair covered. “This is not true,” she explained, referring to the hijab. “Enough lies.” Government security forces tear-gassed and shot at protesters, killing hundreds of people, including at least twenty children. “I would sit in my car and go around the streets of Tehran,” Farhadi told me. “What I was seeing—you don’t need to be political. As a human being, what I was seeing was moving.” He posted a video on Instagram urging artists around the world to stand in solidarity with “progressive and courageous women leading protests for their human rights.” He said, “This society, especially these women, has travelled a harsh and painful path to this point, and now they have clearly reached a landmark.”

A few days later, on state television, a journalist closely allied with the government mocked Farhadi’s statement. “Mr. Farhadi calls himself a defender of women’s rights,” he said. “Now he has to answer Ms. Azadeh Masihzadeh’s accusation. . . . Why did he deprive her of her rights?” He added, “I want to give some good news to the dear audience: one of the American media outlets will talk about this case in October. It will be published in a magazine, and there will be an answer to this story.” An Iranian journalist posted the TV clip on Twitter, writing that the program’s open criticism of Farhadi signalled the “beginning of a new era of the Islamic Republic’s approach to cultural, artistic and media production.”

One tragedy of an unjust regime is that it makes unethical acts seem relatively inconsequential: Farhadi may have abused his power over a student, but the desire to hold him accountable is complicated by the fact that he is being oppressed by a much larger force. Masihzadeh’s story, which until now the government media has largely ignored, is again being taken out of her hands. In the name of her rights, the state seems to be offering a justification for turning against the nation’s most prominent filmmaker.

Khodsiani, the author of “Car Dwellers,” the play that Farhadi directed as a student, told me that, even before Farhadi lost the government’s favor, “ninety-nine per cent of Iranian cinema blamed her.” He predicted that, if the court found Farhadi guilty, people would say that it was only because he had provoked Iran’s authorities: “They will say she is a puppet of the government,” he said.

Farhadi is now in Los Angeles, working on his next movie, but his wife and daughters are still in Tehran. “My heart is there,” he told me, in October. Even if he couldn’t make another movie under the current regime, he said, “I will go back again.” Mani Haghighi recently attempted to leave Iran, for the U.K. première of his new film, at the BFI London Film Festival, but his passport was confiscated at the airport and he was prevented from boarding the plane. He said that Iranian authorities seemed to be creating an “exile in reverse”: artists can neither work nor leave. A day after his passport was taken, a fire broke out at a prison in Tehran where hundreds of protesters and political prisoners, including the filmmaker Jafar Panahi, were incarcerated. Panahi survived, but he described the fire as “the worst hours” of his life.

Farhadi once told a Persian film journal that, in the course of making movies, his definition of morality had changed, to the point that he could no longer categorically state that lying was immoral. “It seems that today, with the conditions and complexities that humanity has to live with . . . part of these value judgments and definitions no longer have much use,” he said. Farhadi denied many of the details in this story, including comments that were captured on video. He said that people had told me lies—a word that he later said I shouldn’t use, because the Farsi word for lie, dorough, has a less severe meaning, and so should instead be translated as “wrong information.” He also told me that the story was unethical. I found it hard not to believe him and not to feel guilty. In eight hours of phone calls with him, I perhaps experienced something similar to what his colleagues felt when they wondered if, for the sake of art, they should suppress their own perspective. There is no clear threshold at which crediting someone, artistically or intellectually, is required. I adopt other people’s ideas, too, mining conversations with friends and colleagues for insights—sometimes even using their words. Even the themes of this article are derivative. I was influenced by Farhadi’s films, to the point that I had to resist the temptation to turn the article into a story of “good versus good,” a framework that is both revelatory and potentially dangerous, because it removes the moral valence of causing harm.

Despite feeling betrayed or diminished by Farhadi, nearly everyone I interviewed said that they wanted him to continue making films. His moral lapses seem closely related to some of his most profound insights. He approaches the ideal of truth from a kind of critical distance, as if at a slight remove—a position that may give him access to one of his most persistent themes, the ways in which good lives are maintained by various shades of selfishness and delusion. “The day I decide to retire from filmmaking, if I ask myself what I’ve done in cinema that makes me happy, and if I’m being honest,” he has said, “I’ll say that it’s all the attention I’ve paid to lying and subterfuge.”

In one of our last conversations, when I expressed discomfort with the claim that I was willfully failing to see the truth, Farhadi softened, explaining that he was going through one of the most emotionally difficult moments of his life. He didn’t know if he could return to Iran, or if he would ever see his parents again. He didn’t know when, or if, his wife and children could get out of the country to be with him. He told me, “I acknowledge that I have problems in my character,” but he said that these flaws were not related to the issues I had written about. “I’m not white,” he said. “I’m not black. I’m gray—I’m a gray person.” He also said that discussing copyright at this moment felt petty: “There are more important issues to talk about in Iran right now.”

But, for some of his female colleagues, the protests had opened up the possibility of no longer having to fulfill expectations that felt like lies. Golshifteh Farahani, the Iranian actress who went into exile in Paris, said that she had decided to speak out in part because she felt that aspects of Farhadi’s behavior “reflect the ways of the Islamic Republic.” He had become so powerful that he could tell people what was true and what wasn’t. “When I was interrogated, and an intelligence person put a paper in front of me, I froze,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t true, but I signed it because of the pressure. And look at the parallel: Farhadi did the same thing to his student.”

Taraneh Alidoosti, the actress who starred in four of Farhadi’s films, described Farhadi as a “premier gaslighter,” but she said that she, like many of his colleagues and friends, nonetheless cared for him and was in awe of his mind. “We never wanted to be the scandal that would ruin his career—we would never do that, and he knew it,” she said. She described Masihzadeh as “the last one that you would have ever thought would fight back—a girl from Shiraz, an enthusiast.”

Years ago, Farhadi said in an interview that he had always wanted to “make a film about somebody who makes a mistake, something he didn’t mean to do, and then spends the film trying to convince the other person that he really didn’t mean it, and to ask for his forgiveness.” He continued, “What I really want is to put the viewers in the shoes of the character in a way where they ask themselves, ‘If I were him, would I forgive the man or not?’ And many people don’t forgive him. Which means that many of us have this potential violence in us.”

Last year, Masihzadeh would have forgiven Farhadi if he had simply told her she had given him a good idea, but in time, as she’d come to feel that he had an almost spooky capacity for control, she’d become bitter. She said that Farhadi had continued to show her: “I have the power to omit you, to clear you, to not let your voice be heard.” Her view of his work was gradually souring—now the only Farhadi films she could talk about with unmarred admiration were two of his earliest ones. Her anger, though, had a limit. “I will be heartbroken if I ever hear that Mr. Farhadi has stopped making films,” she told me. During the second week of protests, Masihzadeh called almost everyone she knew: “Even people who were against me”—in her fight with Farhadi—“I just wanted to forgive them, to be united for a bigger reason.” More recently, though, she told me that she’s no longer sure that she would be upset if Farhadi stopped making films. Maybe she just wouldn’t care.

She described a central theme in “A Hero”: the idea that broken societies, in their longing for a hero, elevate some people to an untenable position, in which they can’t make any errors. “Mr. Farhadi, look at your film,” she said. “If you watch carefully, you will understand that this is very easy to solve. You can say, ‘O.K., I made a mistake.’ But he never does that.” She cried as she spoke. “I am so sorry Mr. Farhadi is like that. I’m so sorry that Mr. Farhadi doesn’t watch his movies carefully. I think he is making films for other people. He doesn’t make films for himself.” ♦