Asghar Farha­di weaves anoth­er tense dra­ma in the first trail­er for A Hero

Noth­ing can stop Asghar Farha­di, the most esteemed direc­tor in the mod­ern Iran­ian cin­e­ma – not Don­ald Trump’s ​“Mus­lim ban” bar­ring him from col­lect­ing his Oscar in 2017, not con­tin­ued fric­tion with the cen­sors in his own coun­try, not even luke­warm reviews for his last fea­ture Every­body Knows. He’s back with anoth­er one of his tense, human­ist dra­mas, and from the sound of things, he’s in top form.

That seems to be the case in the trail­er for his lat­est film A Hero, which sur­faced online this morn­ing. Like his most well-regard­ed suc­cess A Sep­a­ra­tion, he’s trained his focus on the rip­ples of con­flict ema­nat­ing out­ward from a sin­gle deci­sive event and how they dis­rupt the lives of those caught in its rip­tide, such stuff as tragedies are made of.

The film fol­lows Rahim (Amir Jadi­di), on fur­lough out of the debtor’s prison he was forced into after his good-for-noth­ing busi­ness part­ner abscond­ed with all their mon­ey and left Rahim with the deficit. He’s got two days to scrape togeth­er some quick cash to keep him­self a free man, and when he hap­pens upon a bag of gold coins, it looks like he might be able to. But he’s got a riski­er and more ambi­tious plan, which starts with return­ing the coins to their prop­er owner.

In his review out of the film’s Cannes pre­mière, our man on the scene Adam Solomons wrote that as telling Iran­ian sto­ries goes, ​“there’s no one doing it bet­ter.” He had plen­ty of praise to give: “[Rahim’s] endeav­our trans­forms him into an unlike­ly war­rior in a cul­ture war between law-and-order mon­ey lenders and the vul­ner­a­ble bor­row­ers whose ambi­tions require the trust of oth­ers. That pre­car­i­ous sta­tus quo evokes the work of Charles Dick­ens, whose father spent numer­ous stints in the debtors’ prison of the Vic­to­ri­an era, and even Char­lie Chap­lin, who gets a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo.”

In the US, the film is set to receive an awards qual­i­fy­ing roll­out just after the New Year, Farhadi’s work hav­ing been a peren­ni­al favorite of Oscar vot­ers. All signs point to this being anoth­er one of his estab­lish­ment-dar­ling films, start­ing with the Grand Prix it won at its Cannes pre­mière, the lat­est fes­ti­val hard­ware the auteur can add to his mantle.

A Hero comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 7 Jan­u­ary, then Ama­zon Prime Video on 21 Jan­u­ary. A date for the UK has yet to be set.