Iran ‘to sue makers of Argo’

Tehran— Iran’s long-running grievance over its depiction in Hollywood could be heading for the courts after government officials hired a French lawyer to sue the makers of Argo, the Oscar-winning film about the 1979-81 US embassy crisis. Organisers of the Hoax of Hollywood conference in Tehran said they had recruited, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who has also acted for the Venezuelan-born terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, to file a legal complaint against the film’s producers and financial backers for “spreading fear of Iran”. “Argo is made by three film-producing companies in Hollywood [and] the Islamic Republic of Iran is going to sue all those who have been active in the anti-Iran domain, including directors and producers,” said the conference’s general secretary, Mohammad Lesani, according to the news agency Mehr. “Isabelle Coutant-Peyre is among the few international lawyers who accept cases which are somehow anti-Zionist.” He said several meetings had been held with Ms Coutant-Peyre and that a portion of her legal fee had already been paid in advance. Ms Coutant-Peyre told the conference in Tehran’s Palestine Cinema, that she had accepted the case “for the sake of defending Iran”. “I will try to help the world to recognise the true picture of Iranian people,” the semi-official Fars news agency quoted her as saying. Argo, produced by Ben Affleck, George Clooney and Grant Heslov, is based on the story of six American diplomats who escaped Iran after Islamic radicals stormed the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 of their colleagues hostage for 444 days. Iranian officials denounced the film, in which Affleck stars as an undercover intelligence agent, Tony Mendez, as “an advertisement for the CIA” after it was voted Best Picture at last month’s Oscars. It is the latest in a long line of Hollywood productions to be criticised by Iran’s theocratic government. In 2007, the country’s representative to UNESCO lodged an official complaint over the depiction of Iranians in 300, an animated film distributed by Warner Brothers about the battle between Greeks and Persians, at Thermopylae in 480 BC. Complaints have also been made about The Wrestler, a 2008 film in which Mickey Rourke fights an opponent known as “the Ayatollah”, and Not Without My Daughter, which depicts the escape of a real-life American, Betty Mahmoody, from Iran. Agencies