Last monday "The Shape of Water", the fable of love of the mexican director Guillermo del Toro, received 13 Oscar nominations.
On friday the british newspaper The Guardian published the most direct syndication: He said that the mexican director's film could be a stealing.
The play, Let Me Hear You Whisper, which was taken to television in the 60s, has the same line of argument as Del Toro's work, they point out.
The accusation was made by David Zindel, son of Paul Zindel and the author of the work, who told the british newspaper that "The shape of the water" "evidently derives from the story my father wrote".
"We can not believe that a significant Hollywood studio (Fox Searchlight) has made a film that evidently derives from my father's story, without anyone coming to ask us for copyright," Zindel said.
The truth is that the work of Zindel is about a woman who works in the cleaning of a laboratory, which establishes a relationship with a dolphin that is kept there to be investigated and tries several times to release it to take it to its natural habitat.
Fox Searchlight, the company that produced the film, published a statement in which it rejected accusations of plagiarism.
"Guillermo del Toro has not read or seen the work of Zindel in any way, the director has a career of 25 years in which (he has made about 10 films and has always been open to recognize their influences," the company said.
So far the mexican director has not referred to the accusations. However, in recent days Del Toro argued that the original idea had been purchased from his friend Daniel Kraus in 2011, following another accusation of plagiarism, but this time a Dutch short film premiered in 2015.
"The premise that is bought in 2011 is: A woman who does the cleaning in a supersecret laboratory of the government meets a humanoid amphibious creature and helps him escape and takes it home," the director said during an interview with the mexican newspaper Excélsior.
"That's the story I bought openly from Daniel Kraus in December 2011 - January 2012," he said.
"I have 25 years of career and I am infinitely transparent, and in fact I celebrate the influences that I have and how they are transformed when I apply them to my cinema, but this is not the case."
“Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.”
attributed to Mark Twain