The next year, The Scent of Dried Apricots was submitted for an Oscar. The official English subtitles were the ones the studio had made: clean, efficient, dead. The film lost.

The actor said: “You are the first person who heard me.”

So Hussein did something irrational. He downloaded the film file. He opened a free subtitle editor he’d never used before. He listened to the first scene. He typed, in English, what the man actually said. Then the woman’s reply. Then the three-second silence where the wind sounded like a name being swallowed.

No one replied.

He did not check it.