A Reporter at Large a Reckoning

At a dangerous time in Iran, the celebrated director Asghar Farhadi is on trial for using a student’s ideas.

- By Rachel Aviv

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.