Hollywood boss praises Oscar boycott director Asghar Farhadi

Harvey Weinstein criticised the US president’s controversial visa ban and offered his support to Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian director of The Salesman who is boycotting the Oscars.

As Screen Daily reports, delivering a keynote speech at the Power of Film and Moving Image conference, Weinstein said:

“If that ban sticks it will be terrible. We’ve already seen [the effect with] this wonderful movie The Salesman [nominated for best foreign language film]. The director at this point can probably come in now before the appeals court rules but he couldn’t come in before.

“So when you start to lose talent, especially the director of an academy award-nominated movie and a man who’s won the academy award [for A Separation in 2012]… .”  

 “We can point to that film and say ‘this was made by an Iranian filmmaker, starring Iranian actors, look what the people are doing, look what this amazing director has done’. As a world community, we should support that.”

He added Iranian movies like The Salesman went a long way in uniting the two nations.

Farhadi told The New York Times he will not attend the 89th Academy Awards in Hollywood on February 26 in protest over “unjust conditions forced upon some of my compatriots and the citizens of the other six countries” by Trump’s executive orders on immigration.

Weinstein was speaking before a US federal appeals court rejected President Trump’s attempt to reinstate his travel ban on nationals from seven mainly Muslim countries.

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