Keswick Film Festival

Synopsis

From one of Keswick's favourite directors since we showed Oscar-winning 'A Separation' in 2012, this one was set for our Festival until Amazon announced that there was only a 6-week window to see it on the big screen: this is your last chance! Could this be another Oscar for Asghar? Several reviewers think so.

'No Good Deed goes unpunished' should be the subtitle of this film. Our 'hero', Rahim is in prison for an unpaid debt, but is let out on a 2 day pass when his girlfriend finds a bag full of gold coins. They think about repaying his debt, but he decides to try to find the owner of the money instead. This gets picked up by the media and he is made into 'a hero'. "But fate, various forms of Iranian bureaucracy and simmering grudges, reroute Rahim's sudden celebrity. Like all Farhadi's work, 'A Hero' operates as a calmly agonizing procedural, where one evasion or deception naturally squirms into the form of another, and another...That life is shadowed by doubt, fear, economic uncertainty and a million small moral and ethical questions. Those are what 'A Hero' explores, while balancing our sympathies toward what these people are going through" - Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune.

So Farhadi is saying there are no heroes and no villains; "It may be our instinct to understand stories in terms of heroes and villains, but Farhadi, a peerless dramatist, seeks to defy those binaries at every turn" – Scott Tobias, The Reveal.