Director Ben Affleck accepts the "Best Direct
Director Ben Affleck accepts the "Best DirectReuters

The Iranian government is planning to finance a film that it says will correct the historical inaccuracies of the movie "Argo," The New York Times reported.

“Argo,” which was released in October and directed by Ben Affleck, centers around the 1979 hostage crisis, during which Iran's revolutionary students sparked a political crisis in the United States when they took 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days.

The Oscar-nominated film reveals the story of the CIA-backed mission to rescue six American diplomats who had sought refuge from enraged Iranian mobs in the home of the Canadian ambassador, following Iran’s Islamic revolution.

Following its release, the movie was condemned by Iranian officials as anti-Iranian, with others accusing Affleck of promoting “Islamophobia.”

According to The Times, not much is known about the proposed movie, other than its title, “The General Staff,” and its director, Ataollah Salmanian, a minor figure in Iran’s cinema industry. 

“This film, which will be a huge production, should be an appropriate answer to the film ‘Argo,’ which lacks a proper view of historical events,” Salmanian told the semiofficial Mehr news agency.

He has also written the screenplay for the movie, which, according to The Tehran Times, will be paid for by the Iranian government’s Art Bureau.

According to Fox News, “This Iranian tale is expected to portray cowardly U.S. diplomats who are treated well by their captors and eventually safely returned by their Iranian hosts.”