The ability of an Oscar-nominated Iranian director to attend the Academy Awards ceremony next month has been thrown into question by President Donald Trump's order temporarily banning citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States.
Asghar Farhadi, whose film The Salesman is nominated in the best foreign-language film category, was not immediately available for comment.
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Early on Saturday US time, Trita Parsi, director of the National Iranian American Council, based in Washington, broadcast the news in a Twitter post.
Confirmed: Iran's Asghar Farhadi won't be let into the US to attend Oscar's. He's nominated for best foreign language film...#MuslimBan
— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) January 28, 2017
But in a telephone interview hours later, Parsi said he had heard only second-hand that Farhadi would not attend the ceremony on February 26. Parsi said his intention with the message posted on Twitter was to show that under the new immigration policy announced on Friday, no Iranians would be allowed entry into the United States for 90 days.
"The clarification of the law made it very clear that he can't come, whether a green card holder or an Iranian citizen," Parsi said of Farhadi, whose film A Separation won an Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2012.
Parsi added that he had not meant to imply that the US government had requested that Farhadi not come to the Oscars ceremony, but to call attention to the ban itself.
"It is so stunning and shocking, so profoundly un-American, that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around it," Parsi said.
![Iranian director Asghar Farhadi poses for his film The Salesman during the premier in Paris.](/web/20170131095302im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/0/p/m/o/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gu0pmp.png/1485762842179.jpg)
It was unclear whether Farhadi would request an exemption to the visa ban or be granted one by the US government.
Earlier this week,, one of the stars of The Salesman, Taraneh Alidoosti, said in a message on Twitter that she would boycott the Oscars to protest the visa ban which she called "racist". The ban was not policy at the time.
![Taraneh Alidoosti in a scene from the Oscar-nominated film The Salesman. She has vowed to boycott the Oscars in protest ...](/web/20170131095302im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/z/l/p/b/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gu0pmp.png/1485643756308.jpg)
"I decided not to go even if I could, because it hurts me deeply to see ordinary people of my country being rejected for what might be their legal right to have access to their children abroad or to their school classes as students," Alidoosti told The New York Times in an interview.
The government of Iran approved the The Salesman for submission to the Academy Awards; it is one of five films vying for best foreign-language film. The film tells the story of a couple in Tehran whose lives are upended when they move from one apartment to another while they are acting in an amateur production of Death of a Salesman, a play by Arthur Miller.
A spokeswoman for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The academy gives an allotment of tickets to distributors and representatives of all nominated films, who are responsible for securing visas when necessary.
The proposed ban has affected those connected to other films. Iraqi director Hussein Hassan withdrew his visa application to the United States, where he was expected to attend the US premiere of his film Reseba - The Dark Wind at the Miami Film Festival, Variety reported.
The New York Times