In Iran, the men who fought in the Iran–Iraq war are revered as martyrs. But what do their everyday lives look like? Hossein is a pizza delivery man who lives in Tehran’s poorer south. His work takes him to the wealthy north: a foreign, inaccessible world dotted with empty luxury apartments whose owners have fled abroad. There, a former comrade humiliates him with a huge tip – only reinforcing for Hossein that he’ll never afford the jewellery he wants to get his fiancée. Opening with his irrevocably ill-fated robbery attempt, Crimson Gold is a class-conscious crime drama in reverse. It’s in Hossein’s cross-city travails leading up to the robbery that Panahi and writer Abbas Kiarostami find the crucial context of his desperate act.