Not for long, however. As the true story, laced with a few new lies, emerges tweet by tweet, Rahim goes from hero to a thundering zero in a couple of bewildering weeks. This sort of fall from grace is normal, says Farhadi, although the process is accelerated and amplified in our time by social media. Anyone riding high on sudden popularity is ready to fall – or, in current usage, to be cancelled.

“When we make someone an idol, we expect that person to make no mistakes,” says Farhadi. “And that, of course, is impossible. Basically, the mistake Rahim makes is no different from anyone else, but in that position – under the spotlight – it has more consequences.”

Farhadi can’t remember when he first knew he wanted to spend his life telling stories. “I know it happened gradually. All I know is that when I would hear stories told by members of my family, that was one of the most exciting things happening when I was young. And it still is the most exciting and interesting thing in life for me, hearing other people’s stories. Each person has hundreds of stories in their lives that many people don’t know. When somebody passes, those stories pass too.”

Hero stories such as Rahim’s, on the other hand, are something of a staple in the Iranian media. “It’s a kind of propaganda,” says Farhadi. “They make that person an idol and encourage other people to act like them. But usually, they get forgotten very fast and this rapid ascent and descent ruins their lives.”

Farhadi traces his own interest in this phenomenon back to university where, as a theatre student, he saw Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo, the 16th-century physicist who was both lauded and vilified as a heretic by the Catholic Church.

“I would always follow news stories about this concept of creating a hero in society. I chose one for a free interpretation in my film, based on this idea. But the news story was only the starting point,” he says. “The rest I made up.”

How much he made up is the substance of a legal dispute in Iran, where a former student of Farhadi’s, Azadeh Masihzadeh, has accused him of copying the story from a documentary she made about a real case in which a man found and returned a bag of gold coins. Farhadi doesn’t deny using the same news story but maintains it was in the public domain and widely known.

“Both of these films have the same idea,” he says. “And that idea is the idea I brought to my workshop in 2014, about the people who find something valuable, return it to the owner and then become heroes in the media. All my students tried to make a work based on this idea and stories they found in the newspapers.”

Masihzadeh made a short documentary called All Winners, All Losers, which screened at a festival in 2018.

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Following the equivalent of a committal hearing, the plagiarism case will go to court. Possible penalties, according to news reports, include forfeiting to Masihzadeh all profits from A Hero – which was sold to Amazon in the US – or prison.

Farhadi is phlegmatic about the whole business. “We firmly believe that when the experts on copyright give their opinion, we will get the [right] result,” he says. “This is not anything special or unique. Every year in Iran, there are one or two cases like this.”

Perhaps he is just used to trouble. According to his long-time French producer, Alexandre Mallet-Guy, each of Farhadi’s films has been accused by conservatives in Iran of presenting a negative image of the country, while liberals accuse him of letting the regime off the hook. His solution has been to alternate between making films at home and abroad, Mallet-Guy told the Hollywood Reporter. “Just so the situation can die down,” he said. “It’s very difficult for him.”

Farhadi says he has a sense of social responsibility in his filmmaking but within the language of cinema. “And I want to emphasise the language because I don’t want a social responsibility to take anything away from that,” he says. Meanwhile, he steers clear of making obviously political statements, even if some of his public pronouncements might sail close to the wind at home.

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At last year’s Cannes Film Festival, for example, he told the press he would like to “improve something in the world”, his ideal being a future where a child could ask any question freely; nothing would be forbidden “in a world without taboos”. A critical statement, but couched in the vaguest possible terms.

He did draw the line, however, at accepting a special dispensation from former US president Donald Trump’s travel ban on Muslims to attend the 2017 Academy Awards.

The Salesman won the award for best foreign-language film. Iranian astronaut Anousheh Ansari stepped up to accept it with a speech given to her by Farhadi that could stand as his epitaph. It could, in fact, be the epitaph of our era. “Filmmakers create empathy between us and others,” he wrote. “An empathy which we need today more than ever.” That empathy is the guiding spirit of A Hero.