Reel Life: The complex world of Asghar Farhadi

The title of the documentary by the Iranian filmmaker Azadeh Masihzadeh—All Winners, All Losers—could well be the title for the drama unfolding on the sidelines of her mentor Asghar Farhadi’s new film, A Hero. One in which no one appears to be emerging with flying colours.

Reports in foreign film publications last week spoke of Masihzadeh accusing the two times Oscar winner auteur of stealing the idea for his new film from the one she made during a filmmaking workshop held by Farhadi himself in 2014 in Tehran and which was first screened in 2018.

Based on a real-life incident, Masihzadeh’s film is about Shokri, a prisoner from Shiraz in Iran who finds a bag full of money on a day out of prison and decides to return it to the owner. A similar incident is what A Hero pivots on. In the film a bag of gold coins is returned to the owner. This, despite the fact, that the money could have set the guys free of debt and helped commute the sentence or get pardon.

Both leave the viewer with a complicated feeling of inspiration, upliftment yet a doubt, uncertainty and cynicism. And several questions—was the gesture a genuine act of goodness? Or was it goodness that came with a motive? Does it make it any less of a goodness? Would anyone be good if it were not from the gains that come out of it? Is this true altruism?

What also gets dwelled on is the judgmental nature of people and society at large. How easily we put individuals on a pedestal and just as frantically, at the slightest hint of the unfavourable and disagreeable, bring them down. Is that what we are doing to Farhadi as well?

“I think it is important to emphasize that A Hero, like Asghar Farhadi’s other films, features complex situations where the lives of the characters are built upon one another. The story of this former prisoner finding gold in the street and giving it back to its owner is only the starting point of the plot of A Hero. The remaining is Asghar’s pure creation,” said Alexandre Mallet-Guy, the film’s French producer in an interview to Variety.

Just like the ambiguous zone that the films inhabit and explore, the legal rules and processes in the plagiarism trial are as hazy and sketchy. Can’t yet another feature film be made on a real incident, even if a several others exist? Do they all need to be acknowledged in the new one? Most so, can Masihzadeh claim ownership on something that had been in the public domain and can potentially inspire any creator?

“It has been disclosed in both press articles and TV reports years before Ms. Masihzadeh’s documentary was published,” said Farhadi’s spokesperson in an Indiewire article.Masihzadeh has been holding this very argument up for scrutiny. In her initial accusation, she had claimed that “[Shokri’s] story was never in the national media, it was never on TV, it was not available online or in the public record. It was a story I found and researched on my own.”

Which gets more troubling considering this find of hers was given shape in a workshop conducted by Farhadi himself. She has also spoken about a letter Farhadi had asked her to sign in 2019 that the rights of the story rest with him. Farhadi sued her for defamation, a case she has come out of. Can a teacher encroach on a student’s germ of an idea, and claim authorship of it, however many more characters, situations, layers, nuances and complexities he might bring to it?

Does he not need to acknowledge his source? Couldn’t this matter have been sorted out over a chat with Masihzadeh and by giving her work its due credit in A Hero? All that Farhadi had to do was acknowledge his student, her work and his own mentorship of her.

The incident has been creating heated debate in the creative community, in India as well. A new angle has been to look at documentary versus feature filmmaking. A filmmaker friend of mine, Anupama Bose, in an exchange on Facebook called the “available in public domain” line of argument a “blatant show of power and the cockiness of the fiction filmmaking space”. She questions the process of drawing from life and weaving a tale from it and camouflaging the real-life source or not (depending upon the abilities and convenience of the filmmakers).

“It’s time filmmakers, artists and all agencies started acknowledging and respecting the documentary filmmakers’ rigour and ability to sift through myriad news; choose the strands that show potential for an engaging piece of storytelling; research; identify and verify sources; constantly analyse and contextualise material before and after weaving it into the narrative; identify legit talking heads who are ‘articulate’ even in the face of a camera; capture interviews and slices of life seamlessly; visit and revisit material constantly as one edits it to eventually create the film,” she writes.

On the other hand, fiction filmmaker till that point had missed that story completely. It was the documentary that made it accessible to him. “Proximity to the documentary filmmaker made it even more so because he had an insider’s view of the process of sifting through the material and finding the story,” she writes.

For her, above all, it’s about a sense of entitlement of the fiction filmmaker “who feels it’s his birth right to reinterpret reality and be supported by the systems”. “It is the entire system (including laws) that allow it, completely disregarding the work and efforts of those who actually research, source, verify, interpret and present the reality tales,” she writes.

What’s eerie is how the drama in real life mirrors the ones in Farhadi’s own films. The complex moral worldviews, positions, dilemmas and decisions he has been dealing with, in film after film. The investigations that his narratives go into, the probing of secrets, suspicions and lies. All of them in the family/domestic settings, be it The Past or A Separation or Everybody Knows.

With A Hero it’s as though all of them have stepped out of the screen to become real and could, in turn, now inspire another Farhadi film about yet another ethical battleground for right and wrong.

(This was first published in National Herald on Sunday)