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.
The subsequent plagiarism suit also went Masihzadeh’s way in an initial court ruling, after Farhadi claimed he had independently researched the story and did not credit her on A Hero.
The case will now pass to a second judge whose ruling will decide whether or not Farhadi will be convicted.
Masihzadeh’s film was called All Winners, All Losers, and showed at a film festival in the Iranian city of Shiraz in 2018.