Visa Ban Leaves Artists in Limbo, and Institutions Perplexed
PARIS — The Iranian director of “The Salesman,” which is nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, won’t attend next month’s Oscars ceremony. The Metropolitan Museum of Art worries that exhibitions, archaeological surveys and excavations with institutions in the Middle East will have to be canceled or curtailed. And the Sundance Institute Theater Program may have to scale back its exchange program with artists from the Middle East and North Africa.
As President Trump’s executive order seeking to keep many foreigners from entering the United States sowed widespread confusion throughout the immigration system and at airports around the globe, cultural figures and institutions were calculating how the new policies would harm their art and missions.
“Scholarly exchanges and international collaborations are key to our ongoing work, and we are very concerned that a number of programs we have in place could be threatened, just at a time when the world needs more, not less, exchange and mutual understanding,” said Thomas P. Campbell, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The executive order, which was signed by Mr. Trump on Friday, blocks entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. It also suspends entry of all refugees for 120 days and bars Syrian refugees indefinitely. Artists — and citizens — from the affected countries legally residing in the United States said they did not dare leave for fear of being denied re-entry.
In the most high-profile case, Asghar Farhadi, who directed “The Salesman,” said in a statement on Sunday to The New York Times that he would not attend the Oscars ceremony next month even if he were granted an exception to the visa ban.
He had planned to attend the Feb. 26 ceremony and to use the megaphone the Oscars provides to call attention to a visa ban he called “unjust.” But new regulations announced on Friday presented “ifs and buts which are in no way acceptable to me even if exceptions were to be made for my trip,” he said.
In his statement, Mr. Farhadi, whose film “A Separation” won an Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2012, said he condemned “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.”
Mr. Farhadi’s film centers on a Tehran couple starring in an amateur production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” and includes subtle critiques of censorship in Iran. The film’s screenplay had to be approved by the Iranian government, which also chose the film as the country’s official submission to the Academy Awards.
Marcel Mettelsiefen, the director of “Watani: My Homeland,” an Oscar-nominated documentary, said the film’s Syrian protagonist, Hala Kamil, would not be able to travel to the Oscars ceremony because she has a Syrian and a German refugee passport.
The film follows Ms. Kamil and her children as they seek asylum in Germany. “It is very sad she cannot come,” Mr. Mettelsiefen said. “She is the star of the movie.”
Ms. Kamil has been a frequent visitor to the United States, even…
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