How Director Daryush Shokof Hoaxed His Way Through Life, Staged His Own Kidnapping & Falsely Accused The Iranian Regime, And Now Wants To Scam 4 Billion Dollars

He first made a name for himself as a script-writer by copying works from two great directors of the time Federico Fellini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, changing the names of the characters and some situations and presented them to his father as his own works, which made his father believe he was a genius.

From Daryush Shokof’s bio on IMDB

The time has come to tell the story of one of the greatest impostors in the film and art world. It is the story of a ridiculous man and pathological liar. One who scammed countless people in Cologne by claiming to film a Hollywood movie there before leaving a trail of devastation, a web of lies, and a huge pile of debt when he fled the city. It is the story of a fake artist who staged his own kidnapping and tried to politicize it for publicity, the story of a sociopath who now wants to scam 4 billion dollars from the world. This is a true story, and no names will be changed.

Daryush Shokof. According to his Wikipedia, “He was born as Ali Reza Shokoufandeh on June 25, 1954 in Tehran, Iran. Shokof graduated from Eastern New Mexico University with a degree in Physics and Mathematics. Shokof received an MBA from University of Dallas in Texas.” Unfortunately, most (if not all) of this is a lie to make Shokof appear like some triple genius of art, science, and economy. The University of Dallas confirmed that there was never a student of either name attending the university, leave alone graduating with an MBA. It is not clear what Shokof did in the USA before immigrating to Germany in early 1980’s.

In 2005, the White House Studios in Cologne hired me as an assistant for the production of Shokof’s new film with the working title “www.50.gone“. In the past, Shokof had managed to co-direct (with Stefan Jonas) the independent film Seven Servants (1996) starring Anthony Quinn, a fact that gave Shokof credibility for many years and hoaxes to come. Shokof was a bald, roundish 5“7 man with sharp, raised eyebrows, who resembled a pirate-type Lucifer to me, only the horns and creole earrings were missing. Shokof dressed like a clochard for the sake of eccentricity. His fashion sense was limited to cutting the legs of his suit trousers off to half the calves, but he drew attention with these looks, simply because he didn’t look like everybody else. It looked bad, it looked ridiculous, but people convinced themselves of it to be some artistic expression coming from the outer spectrum of avantgarde. It was truly a ‘The Emperor is Naked’ experience, and my first lesson in this entire story: when people consider you an *artist*, you get away with almost everything, and most of your shortcomings will be turned into virtues.

Shokof lived in the 5-star Hotel Maritim in Cologne, with unlimited credit based solely on the magical words that he was shooting a movie with Hollywood stars in Cologne. He never made the payments for his suite and the many expenses attached to it, which all added up to over €100000. He also never paid various stores where he bought and ordered clothes, supposedly for the film but in reality for himself and his family and friends. He also never paid the Italian restaurant where he used to go for lunch with the entire team on a daily basis. He never paid the hard working owners of the small bakery which delivered the team sandwiches and drinks every day. And well, he never paid the people working for him, like me. Lesson No. 2: Being an *artist* makes you strangely trustworthy, you slip through the webs of regulation and will be granted unlimited goodwill and credit. Lesson No. 3: Indeed, most all people are blinded by fame and glamour.

Since he was a writer/ director, I and others often wanted to start a conversation about film with him. He was completely unenthusiastic about it. He never took the initiative in such conversations and did not opine. But he had the talent to nod at the right moments when certain acclaimed directors and their films were being mentioned. But then again, Shokof was clever enough to not talk too much in general. Because it’s little things that give a liar and psycho away. A false word or an erratic move that gives you a glimpse of the true personality. So it took me about two months until I noticed that this guy was a pathological and nasty liar- at the point where he told me that his “best friend“ Marlon Brando cooks for him, I had already heard enough.

I realized that Shokof was not planning to do this film for artistic reasons, or at all. Although he had a partly confirmed, strangely mixed cast of German and American b-stars like Gary Busey, Norman Reedus, and the anti-Iranian hero Sally Field, Shokof kept pushing me to contact big companies like Nokia for sponsoring and to offer them limitless product-placement in his film (“Tell them that I can show their cellphones and brand logo throughout the entire movie, as long as they want to.”) He was obviously intending to personally grab a lot of money from sponsors and the generous German film funding, and he also offered me and others a big share of the money if we would succeed in getting it for him. Meanwhile, the crew- including me- didn’t get paid their wages. There were always new excuses and delays, and we ended up earning nothing for four months of daily work.

The sad thing is that everybody wanted to believe him and therefore most closed their eyes when things started to look suspicious and shady. They were impressed and intimidated by fake Hollywood glamour, by the actors who were supposed to play in this film, by the prospects and chances they saw for themselves, and they wanted to hold on to these chances. Who could really blame them. Part of it was also avoidance of the huge, numbing shame that overtakes when you have to admit to yourself that an impostor blinded you. Lesson No. 4: ‘hope’ is very likely blurred reality and a creeping sense of failure.

Another important reason on why Shokof could fool so many people for so long was silence because of a conspirative climate – he didn’t want us to be friends and talk and exchange. Let me give you one bitter example: my fellow assistant was Anna Katharina Samsel, who later on had a small TV career by playing an ice figure skater in a German evening series. I didn’t connect well with Anna, because we were very different personalities, and because I cannot deal with actors, they always leave me in doubt about their authenticity. She wanted to make a career as an actress, whereas I had no aspirations to work professionally in the film business and didn’t even want to be an extra in the movie. One day during a meeting with me, Shokof mentioned that he was having an affair with her. I thought, “She would not be the first actress to sleep her way up”. Shokof became nasty. Every once in a while he would drop unnecessary and boastful sexual comments. When I said “Good Morning,” he would answer with “Anna didn’t let me sleep all night.” I started to avoid him, and when one day he grabbed his erection through his pants while looking at me, I stopped being alone in a room with him. He was disgusting.

Only: it had all been a lie. Years later, I met Anna and told her about the things Shokof had said about her. She then told me that Shokof had claimed the same things about me. I am not talking about emotional cruelty or #metoo here, but libel and dishonoring a woman, so I wanted to kill him, and still want to. The lesson to this complex episode is not so easy to frame. You don’t invade the privacies of others and ask strangers about their affairs or sex gossip, so I don’t know how all of this could have possibly been prevented.

For the last month of the project, Shokof didn’t come into the production offices anymore. I secured mails and other evidence for the entire fraud that I used later in court. After 4 months, the whole project was finally blown off and Shokof fled Cologne, leaving behind unpaid bills and wages in the amount of about 1 million dollars. The creditors bombarded me with calls and mails, since I had been the assistant of the production and handled all these organizational things. I told them how it was- that Daryush Shokof had fucked us all over. The people working for the production were devastated. Some of them had worked for nothing over half a year long, which was ruinous for many. But something strange happened then that I will never forget: all of them stood calm and carried on. Besides the big companies, nobody sued him privately, but everybody almost immediately accepted their fate gave up. I ended up being the only one suing Shokof and getting paid after a year of court proceedings. And that was a most important lesson: the people will not unite and stand up, no matter how hard they’re getting fucked over.

But if you think now that this was all and enough of a story for me to write about, you are wrong. The best is yet to come. All is turning into a political thriller, what else!

In May 2010, Shokof realized what was his most adventurous and comedic script to date. The local newspaper’s headline read: ‘Kidnapped Iranian director found at the shores of the Rhine River‘. I had to laugh hard and hysterically. This fucker! Only a twisted Abd theatratical jester like him could have come up with such an outrageous story! But I get ahead of myself…

On June 5th at 11pm, three teenagers hanging around at the Rhine River on a Saturday night saw a small, wet man emerging from the dark, looking scared and confused. „He came up to us, saw us, lay down exhausted and kept repeating: „My name is Shokof, call the police, I was kidnapped.“ Shokof claimed that he was kidnapped, tied up, and drugged, and because of the drugs could remember nothing of what happened in the last 12 days, just that he was brought back to the Rhine by a car, and was threatened and thrown into the river with tied up feet (which he somehow untied like a true magician). Conveniently, he got the precise reason for his ‘kidnapping’ during the only tiny moment that he was not drugged up! “I was taken to an apartment. I still remember it because I wasn’t drugged at the time /…/ Then the older man came up to me and accused me of offending Islam, the Islamic government and Khomeini through my films. Then he threatened me with death.”

Preceding that, the Club of Iranian-European Filmmakers had penned an open letter suspecting that Shokof was kidnapped as politically motivated act, suggesting the involvement of the Iranian government and asking the German authorities to search for Shokof, who had gone “missing” by not boarding his train from Cologne to Paris. The Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi stated that “the disappearance of Shokof” reminded her of the political serial killings of the opponents of the Islamic Republic in the 1990s and also blamed the German federal government for this. “I hereby announce that the responsibility for the disappearance of an Iranian artist lies with the German federal government.” Can we already speak of a conspiracy here with so many parties involved?

The German government and law enforcement indeed took the task serious and exposed the story as what it was: a complete lie where nothing added up, a lie by Shokof to get attention. After extensive medical examination, no traces of any drugs were found in Shokof’s organism, as no proof or evidence was found to back any part of his story. In addition, investigators contacted people who had been in a legal dispute with Shokof in the past, including me. I can just guess how many of them were there, but I am pretty sure that they all said the same thing as me: „He’s a pathological liar. The worst of all liars.“

What could Shokof’s motive have been to stage his own kidnapping? Victimizing himself in order to make his many frauds forgotten, gaining empathy to make his sins forgotten, paired with the artist’s sick symbiose with publicity. Shokof had just finished a terribly acted torture porn with Midnight Express vibes, claiming to depict daily rape and violence that was going on in all Iranian prisons. The Club of Iranian-European Filmmakers suggested that this ‘precious’ film with an IMDB rating of 2.2, Iran Zendan, was the reason for the kidnapping. Fortunately once again, the “4 arab-speaking” kidnappers varified that before they drugged Shokof up for twelve days (to then just let him go senselessly): „I was told that I had not been killed yet because I was the only one who could stop the screening of the films “Iran Zendan” and “Hitler’s Grave,“ Shokof told the police.

Shokof never jumped on his train from Cologne to Paris, but he and some other exile-Iranians jumped on the train to falsely compromise the Iranian regime for some reason. “It was very likely staged for attention and publicity,” was how the German police put it. But most importantly: because it seemed like such an easy thing to do. People wanted to believe him. Aren’t we all conditioned to believe that the Iranian regime is satanic and doing all kinds of bad things? Haven’t we positioned ourselves comfortably in this manufactured consent? The Shokof story shows that things are not always what they seem to be, but much more complex, and the moral compass can only stay intact if it can still call out injustice as injustice, and a lie as a lie. Which was my biggest lesson in this story.

***

So, what is Shokof up to these days? Still chasing the big money. Lately he was trying to sell 4 ugly sculptures for 1 billion dollars each, meaning for 4 billion dollars (4000 Million Dollars) in total. In a strange video interview on an obscure YouTube channel, he once again showcases his deep love for money and everything material, bizarrely referring to his “real platinum” dog chain necklace multiple times, and claiming that the 4 billion dollars should go to a “Shokof Foundation” which would contribute to “any foundations over the world, that would do everything for the wellness of this planet,” and urges the interviewer to “please understand that I cannot go into details”. The 4 sculptures are shaped as pyramids made of dollar bills.

Back to Cologne in 2005: Shokof never paid the sculptor and artist Mehmet R. who he had hired to build some sculptures for him.

by Saliha Enzenauer

Update: I woke up to a meme this morning with the title “The Mullah Regime And It’s Western Allies” followed by “It is obvious that the Iran regime has found and sponsored the perfect mouthpiece in Saliha Enzenauer and the platform Vynil (sic) Writers” and further on lengthily tries to depict me as some jealous loser, threatening a lawsuit on me.

Not just a mouthpiece, but THE PERFECT mouthpiece. So punk! I never knew that the Iranian regime had such good taste and was into the sex, drugs & rock’n’roll on Vinyl Writers… But fun aside: I am actually very happy about this outrageous claim which so perfectly supports many of my talking points here.

The information I shared in my article is linked to several German mainstream news articles on the “kidnapping”, and the German police’s statement that it was “staged for attention”. It’s not rocket science- most information shared in my article can be easily and legally obtained by contacting the German officials, police and justice court, the hotel and production studio I’m naming, or by contacting the University of Dallas. But it seems like freedom of information is not a high value for some, or reserved to only a few. Instead, you’re immediately discredited as some sort of agent. Lunacy!

Some commenters on here pointed out that Shokof is running multiple rather vicious right-wing accounts on Instagram which are feverously supporting Trump “the truly brave genius”, calling for the “destruction of the barbaric/stupid/bastard left” that “invented Corona”, a left that could only be saved by “teaching them FREEDOM FORCEFULLY”. Not actually a Gandhi talking here. Now, would a normal reaction to all of these posts be to paranoidly call Shokof some American agent? No, at least not for me. He’s just one of many and making use of his freedom of speech and fantasy like thousands of the more crude Trump voters and QAnon-style lunatics.

I don’t have a history of supporting the Iranian regime, like Shokof supports the current American regime f.e. I don’t support any regime, since I don’t identify as a slave. I can only say that as a Muslim woman, I would actually never want to live in a restrictive country like the Iran.

Finally, let me express that it’s sad to see that while a true opposition is needed in Iran to solve the country’s obvious problems, the righteous matter gets discredited by such acteurs. It’s the same counterproductive shit that’s numbing true change and counter-cultural movements everywhere around the globe.

Now excuse me, I have to call back my dear friend Kim Jong Un.

Saliha Enzenauer – October 12, 2020