Asghar Farhadi won’t attend the Oscars after Trump’s visa ban

His film, The Salesman, is nominated in the best foreign-language film category

Scriptwriter Asghar Farhadi, winner of the award for Best Script for the movie The Salesman, attends the Palme D'Or Winner Press Conference during the 69th annual Cannes Film Festival at the Palais des Festivals on May 22, 2016 in Cannes, France. (Ian Gavan/Getty)

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose film The Salesman is nominated for an Oscar in the best foreign-language film category, has no plans to attend next month’s Academy Awards ceremony—even if he’s given an exemption to President Trump’s visa ban.

The president signed his executive order Friday, implementing a 90 day ban for citizens in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. It also suspended all refugees from entering the country for 120 days while Syrian refugees are barred indefinitely.

After planning to attend the February 23 ceremony in Los Angeles, Farhadi issued a statement to the New York Times on Sunday calling President Trump’s executive actions “in no way acceptable" to him "even if exceptions were to be made for my trip.”

“I would therefore like to convey via this statement what I would have expressed to the press were I to travel to the United States. Hard-liners, despite their nationalities, political arguments and wars, regard and understand the world in very much the same way,” he explained. “In order to understand the world, they have no choice but to regard it via an ‘us and them’ mentality, which they use to create a fearful image of ‘them’ and inflict fear in the people of their own countries.”

“This is not just limited to the United States; in my country hardliners are the same,” he continued. “For years on both sides of the ocean, groups of hardliners have tried to present to their people unrealistic and fearful images of various nations and cultures in order to turn their differences into disagreements, their disagreements into enmities and their enmities into fears. Instilling fear in the people is an important tool used to justify extremist and fanatic behavior by narrow-minded individuals.”

Still, he said he believes there are similarities among people and their cultures across the globe and those similarities “far outweigh the differences.”

“I believe that the root cause of many of the hostilities among nations in the world today must be searched for in their reciprocal humiliation carried out in its past and no doubt the current humiliation of other nations are the seeds of tomorrow’s hostilities. To humiliate one nation with the pretext of guarding the security of another is not a new phenomenon in history and has always laid the groundwork for the creation of future divide and enmity,” he explained. “I hereby express my condemnation of the unjust conditions forced upon some of my compatriots and the citizens of the other six countries trying to legally enter the United States of America and hope that the current situation will not give rise to further divide between nations.”

Taraneh Alidoosti, the star of The Salesman, spoke out against Trump’s proposal by announcing her own boycott on Twitter. “Trump's visa ban for Iranians is racist,” she wrote. “Whether this will include a cultural event or not, I won't attend the #AcademyAwards 2017 in protest.”