General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

A Hero

A Hero (Persian: Ghahreman, قهرمان) is a 2021 Persian-language drama film written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, an Iran–France co-production about a man on leave from a debtor's prison whose act of returning lost gold coins makes him a public hero and then a public suspect. It runs 127 minutes and stars Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Sahar Goldust, and Fereshteh Sadrorafaii.¹ The film premiered in competition at the 74th Cannes Film Festival, where it shared the Grand Prix with Juho Kuosmanen's Compartment No. 6.²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Asghar Farhadi, his ninth feature and first set in Iran since The Salesman (2016)¹^•³
Production	Iran–France co-production; produced by Memento Production, Asghar Farhadi Production, and ARTE France Cinéma; 127 minutes¹
Setting	Shiraz, the first Farhadi feature set in his native city rather than Tehran³
Premise	Rahim, imprisoned for an unpaid debt of 150,000 tomans, uses a two-day leave to try to persuade his creditor to withdraw his complaint⁴
Cannes 2021	Grand Prix (ex-aequo) with Compartment No. 6 (the FIPRESCI Award went to Drive My Car); also the François Chalais Award²^•⁵^•⁶^•²⁴
Awards context	Iran's official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards⁶
Critical reception	Metascore 82 from 39 reviews; 97% on Rotten Tomatoes from 187 reviews⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot

Rahim (Amir Jadidi) is serving a three-year sentence in a debtor's prison in Shiraz for failing to repay a debt of 150,000 tomans to Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), a hard-headed creditor who is also his former brother-in-law and whose grudges against Rahim are, in Guy Lodge's words, "densely compacted and weaponised".⁴ On a two-day leave, Rahim hopes to persuade Bahram to withdraw his complaint in exchange for partial payment.¹

The found coins. Rahim's girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), his son's speech therapist, finds a woman's handbag containing 17 gold coins. Selling them would not yield enough to clear the debt, so Rahim instead launches a public campaign to return the bag to its owner, counting on the publicity to restore his reputation.⁴ A woman comes forward, television and newspaper coverage follows, and a local charity collects donations to pay off his debt.⁴ The prison authorities promote the story, eager for good publicity after the suicide of an inmate protesting prison conditions.⁹

The unraveling. Rahim's account of how the bag was found, built of what one reviewer calls "wobbly semi-facts, though not exactly lies", begins to fall apart under scrutiny.¹⁰ A skeptical official demands proof that the woman who lost the bag exists, and when Rahim cannot find her he persuades Farkhondeh to pose as her.¹¹ As doubts spread, public admiration turns to suspicion, and Rahim returns to prison at the end of the film, unable to repay his debt.¹²

Themes and style

Farhadi described the film's subject as "the rise and fall of a person; of somebody who is taken and put in the spotlight without doing anything for it and all of a sudden is taken down from it". Social media entered the story as the tool that makes such rapid ascents and descents possible, alongside newspapers and television.¹³ He deliberately avoided showing screens on camera, choosing instead to depict the consequences of online judgment; in his view social media "tries to explain a very complicated situation in very small elements and few words".¹⁴

The film examines Iranian institutions as much as individuals: a bureaucratic system whose demands for evidence can entangle anyone, a prison and a charity that each need a good news story, and a culture in which reputation is, in Farhadi's words, "a treasure, an asset".¹⁵^•³^•¹⁶ One scholarly reading describes the film as tracing "the tragic transformation of a hero into an anti-hero under the pressures of moral perfectionism" and a social cycle of "powerlessness—cunning deception—distrust".¹⁷

Visually the film keeps to Farhadi's established manner: minimal camera movement, no musical score, and negotiations staged in cramped offices, with traffic noise standing in for music.¹⁸^•⁴ Farhadi cast his daughter Sarina Farhadi as Nazanin, as he had in A Separation.¹⁵

Origins and plagiarism dispute

Farhadi said the idea came from press stories he had read for years about ordinary people briefly celebrated for an altruistic act; the film was not based on one specific news event.¹ In 2014 he had led a student workshop at the Karnameh Institute of Arts and Culture in Tehran making a documentary on the heroization of people who find and return valuable objects.¹⁹

After the film's release, former student Azadeh Masihzadeh, who directed the documentary All Winners, All Losers from that workshop, filed a plagiarism complaint in Iran. In April 2022, reports said a Tehran court had found Farhadi guilty of violating her copyright; Farhadi's attorney argued that the underlying 2012 story of a Shirazi prisoner was already published in mass media and in the public domain, so no one could claim exclusive ownership of it.²⁰ Separately, on November 17, 2021, Farhadi had publicly called on Iranian officials to withdraw the film from Oscar consideration after an anonymous critic called him "pro-government".²¹

Reception

The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes, shared with Compartment No. 6, and was Iran's entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar.²^•⁶ Critics broadly praised its moral intricacy and Jadidi's performance, with a Metascore of 82 from 39 reviews and a 97% Tomatometer score.⁷^•⁸^•³ Some reviewers were cooler: Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian called the realist tale "too messy and unsatisfactory", and Owen Gleiberman in Variety judged it a film that speaks "to our heads more than it does our hearts".¹¹^•²² Several critics noted that the film reads as a study of social media backlash and cancel culture while barely showing a screen.²³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2020 to 2022

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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