There’s a harrowing Iranian drama called A Hero currently playing on Amazon, and it’s getting a lot of attention. It’s sure to be nominated for many awards, including the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, not just on its own merits but because the much-honored writer-director Asghar Farhadi has already won that Oscar twice before, for A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016).

A Hero is about a handsome, endearing young man named Rahim (Amir Jadidi), imprisoned for debt, who’s let out of prison on a rare two-day leave with hopes of arranging to pay off the debt — or at least enough of it to give his creditor, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), reason to drop the charge against him. That’s one of the few ways he can avoid serving the remainder of a ten-year prison sentence, because imprisonment for debt in Iran is apparently as irrational a bureaucratic nightmare as it was in the nineteenth-century England Charles Dickens wrote about. Considering that the likeliest people to be imprisoned for debt are poor, with families who can’t pay the debt either, what’s the point of locking them up?

The only hope Rahim has of satisfying his creditor is due to some miraculous bit of luck from the woman he’s involved with, the charmingly devoted Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust). She’s found a lost purse in the street filled with seventeen gold coins.