Cast and crew members risked everything for Iranian dissident Mohammed Rasoulof’s new film.
Cast and crew members risked everything for Iranian dissident Mohammed Rasoulof’s new film.
By Stephanie Bunbury
February 11, 2025 — 11.00pm
Mohammed Rasoulof was in prison when he hit on the central idea for The Seed of the Sacred Fig. It was 2022, and he was serving one of several sentences for making films the Iranian regime didn’t like. For 15 years, he had been tangling with authority figures – firstly the censors and then the intelligence services – and wondering who these people really were.
“All these years this question was in my head,” he said at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where his film drew a standing ovation from an audience of several thousand people. “The people who sat across from me, who blindfolded me and interrogated me: I thought, ‘What is this difference between these people and myself?’” Maybe, he thought, they were somehow biologically different from him, with some tweak that drove them to do things he would find impossible. Was there a gene for bullies? “This curiosity has always been with me.”
The spark for his new film was a surprising encounter with one of these interrogators. Outside the prison walls, the Women, Life, Freedom movement was raging in response to the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, who had been jailed for not wearing a hijab. Inside, an officer made Rasoulof the surprise gift of a pen. He then broke down into a confession. “He told me about the deep embarrassment and self-hatred he was experiencing, about how he was even thinking about suicide and about how fiercely his children criticised him,” Rasoulof said in one interview. “And at that point, I thought it would be very interesting to make a film about a family like his, with this profound rift at its core.”
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is now a shortlisted contender for the Oscar for best international film. Rasoulof wrote it in secret after he was freed, realising as he worked that his imaginary family was like a miniature version of the country itself: a group of women controlled by a fanatical but otherwise ordinary man. At home, Iman (Missagh Zareh) is an authoritarian but fond patriarch. At work, he is climbing the ladder in the government’s legal office, where he has risen from prison officer to interrogator and is now on the brink of being appointed a judge.
Iman is not ostensibly a sadist, but he is ambitious. As a judge, he will be able to provide a better apartment, something his daughters ought to appreciate. His wife wants appliances: she shall have them. As the protests gather force, Iman signs piles of death warrants without even reading the cases against those sentenced. What counts is that he is now important: so important, in fact, that his boss solemnly presents him with a revolver to protect himself.
At home, Iman’s wife Naimeh (Soheila Golestani) is both his enforcer and the family peacemaker, trying to keep their increasingly disaffected daughters in check. Resvan (Mahsa Rostami) is at college, a studious girl whose eyes have been forced open by more daring friends who have joined the protests; Sana (Setareh Maleki) is still at school, but already a revolutionary at heart. The tension rises steadily. When the office gun disappears, Iman suspects – or knows – that one of his beloved children has taken it. As an interrogator, he knows exactly how to exact a confession. Would he use those tricks on his own daughters?
“As the story progresses, we go backwards at the same time through Iman’s life, slowly retracing his steps,” says Rasoulof. Eventually, the family retreats from the hostile mob to the remote but prosperous farm where he grew up. “I thought it was very important to show what kind of family he came from and that he really learned submission to power from a very young age,” says the director. “And of course the weapon is an important part of this, because it is a symbol of power.” Iman doesn’t have to fire it; merely possessing it puts him in charge.
Rasoulof can only present his film at Locarno because he now lives in Germany as a political refugee; The Seed of the Sacred Fig entered the Oscar race as a German film. His Iranian passport was confiscated in 2017, making travel impossible. Last year, he faced eight years in jail – an accumulation of sentences that had been interrupted by COVID – as well as a flogging, the punishment for owning a bottle of wine discovered during a raid on his apartment. The time had come to leave. He went on foot, walking over the mountains from Iran and into Europe.
Advertisement
Rasoulof was first arrested in 2010, when he was working with the renowned dissident Jafar Panahi – currently under house arrest – on a film called The White Meadows. His own earlier films, he says, were more elliptical, drawing on the metaphor inherent in Farsi. He is now ambivalent about that heritage, along with other received Persian traditions.
“Totalitarianism has a long tradition in Iran. It doesn’t begin with the Islamic Republic 40 years ago,” he says. “And throughout this long history of totalitarianism, a very specific aesthetic was developed that met power with silence and placed art as somehow beyond the scope of politics, as something higher.
“When I made The White Meadows it coincided with the contested 2009 elections and the Green movement in Iran, I realised that the reason I was working with metaphors was to circumvent censorship; they were engendered by fear. I didn’t want to operate that way. I wanted to talk in a straighter way about what was happening around me.”
Since then, Rasoulof has made his films underground. That doesn’t mean, he stresses, that he makes them invisibly. Several scenes in The Seed of the Sacred Fig were shot outside; one was filmed in a cafe, when the crew was invited to shoot there when they showed their permit to make another film altogether. “Because it was about an observant family, everyone was wearing a chador and no one thought it was underground!” Rasoulof laughs. “In fact passersby saw us and insulted us because they thought we were from the Iranian Republican TV making some sort of propaganda – we heard so many swear words!”
Putting a film together without a permit is, however, formidably difficult. There is no point trying to find finance before the shoot because the likelihood is that everyone will be arrested mid-stream. Actors and crew must be approached with extreme caution. “I go to the people who already have this desire to go against the system. And then people who think like me also approach me to work with me.” They will not see the real script until the last minute.
Loading
What now? Rasoulof is now a stranger in a strange land, exiled from his core subject. “In terms of my life, yes, it’s been a big change because I had to leave the country,” he says. “But cinematically, I’m still the same person because I’ve always worked around limitations.”
It is also true, he adds, that he is just one of millions of Iranians who have left the country for different reasons, many of them because they didn’t want to live under the authority of the Islamic Republic. “And thanks to technology, we are part of what I’d call cultural Iran; we are all interconnected.”
But then, of course, there is the question: can he make a film that is not made underground? “It’s an interesting challenge. We’ll see.”
The Seed of the Sacred Fig opens February 27.
Stephanie Bunbury is a film and culture writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Loading
Discover more from World Byte News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
