2021 Iranian-French drama film written and directed by Asghar Farhadi.

Iranian cinema

Iranian movie making scene is one of the most vibrant and interesting of our current times. Artists have to deal with a complex and dangerous political environment and censorship. Many artists face repression, impossibility to work. For example, Jafar Panahi is famous for his troubles with authorities, banned for film making for year even though he managed somehow with Taxi Teheran. He was even imprisoned last year, began a hunger strike before being released 48 hours later.

Asghar Farhadi

A Hero is Farhadi's 9th feature film, latest work to date. He is one of the most prominent Iranian directors today, internationally recognized, known for "About Elly", "A separation", "The Past", "The Salesman".

Like all of his other works, "A Hero" won many awards in festivals, including Cannes's "Grand Prix" in 2021 (second award after the "Palme d'Or").

Movie

The movie is about Rahim, who, like many of the characters in Fahradi's previous stories, is an ordinary human character and hasn't received much attention. He has done mistakes, errors, and good things like every person has. He is simpler than the characters in Fahradi's previous films, but circumstances and social environment gets him involved in almost unbearable difficulties.

Dispute

A Hero was inspired by the story, initially published in newspapers, of a man who returned a bag of cash he found while on a leave from a debtors' prison in Shiraz. A student of Fahradi, who attended a workshop on documentary filmmaking made a documentary about this story in 2015 in Tehran.

Followed a series of legal and procedural cases, counter cases, threats for plagiat, defamation, etc, that Fahradi mostly won.

So it's quite disturbing how the gestation of this movie is like a plot of Fahradi.

In Iranian cinema, the border between fiction and reality is often quite blur, like in Abbas Kiarostami's Close Up, a fascinating fiction/documentary about an impostor of another famous director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Confusing? Indeed... Maybe a parabole of how Iranian artists succeed to speak about their society and escape from censorship and repression from local authorities. Of course, any similarity with our local situation would be an oversight.

Like Fahradi said:

This is the effect that a work of art can have: to put people emotionally in a space where they can think better.