Oscar–winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s plagiarism battle has taken a new twist. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Farhadi has been indicted in Iran on charges that he took the idea for his film A Hero from his former film student Azadeh Masihzadeh. The movie was shortlisted for this year’s best-international-feature Oscar. 

A Hero won the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix award before hitting theaters and Amazon Prime. It tells the story of Rahim (Amir Jadidi), a floundering man who, despite his own debts, returns a bag of found gold coins to authorities in order to stoke his own public image. Last September, Farhadi told Vanity Fair that he was first attracted to the themes of his film when he read Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo at university. “It always stayed with me,” he said, but “I never thought that I would write a movie or a play or anything about that concept.