The Seed of the Sacred Fig arrives in Ireland as one of the most-celebrated films of the past year. Mohammad Rasoulof’s nail-biting thriller got a 13-minute standing ovation at Cannes film festival, where it also won the special jury prize. It’s a mesmerisingly gripping feature in which the paranoia, misogyny and rage of the Iranian state are mapped seamlessly on to an ordinary family, as one reviewer wrote after its emotional French debut.
It has now also been nominated for the Oscar for best international film at the Academy Awards next month.
It’s a bittersweet moment for the film-maker, who was smuggled out of Iran before the film’s premiere. For several weeks Rasoulof secretly passed through remote villages, set out on foot across mountains and eventually crossed the border, ultimately taking refuge in Germany.
“It certainly is a very complex situation, and at the same time it’s so full of hope,” Rasoulof, who is the film’s writer as well as director, says. “An Iranian short animated film” – In the Shadow of the Cypress, by Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi – has also just been nominated for an Academy Award.
“It was made by these two amazing artists who had been devoted to their craft for many years. There was no Oscar campaign behind them. No one was helping them. I think if that doesn’t give us hope, what does?”
The Seed of the Sacred Fig concerns a close-knit family: father Iman (Missagh Zareh), his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), and their two daughters, 21-year-old Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and her teenage sister, Sana (Setareh Maleki).
As the film opens, Iman is promoted to investigating judge in Tehran’s revolutionary court – initially a cause for celebration. Najmeh’s pride in her husband is soon undermined by paranoia, however.
Iman’s elevation coincides with a period of unrest – the film is pointedly book ended with documentary footage from the Woman, Life, Freedom protests – and increasing uneasiness.
There is a clear generational divide in the home: Najmeh is supportive of her husband and the theocratic laws he represents; the girls are sympathetic towards the protesters they see on their phones.
In the heated political climate, Iman is given a gun to protect himself, but the weapon goes missing after he fails to secure it. Suddenly, everyone in the family, including his devoted wife, is a suspect.
It takes some time, and no small amount of suppression, for the terrorised women in the family to enact a miniature of the civil unrest that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody.
Genre fans will note pleasing similarities with the escalating menace of Jack Nicholson’s controlling patriarch in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining. The final white-knuckle sequence is an extraordinary indictment of the appalling treatment of women under a religious patriarchy that claims to protect their interests.
“I was writing the script, and it was only when I got towards the end of it that I realised I was consciously very close to two other films,” Rasoulof says. “One is Straw Dogs, by Sam Peckinpah, and of course the other is The Shining. That’s when I started to really question myself. What should I do? Of course, this happened unconsciously, but should I take another route?
“And then I thought, ‘This has happened: just accept it’. I think there’s one clear difference between those films and the form of power I am dealing with in The Seed of the Sacred Fig. It is faith-based. It conceives itself as being blameless and right.”
Born in the Iranian city of Shiraz in 1972, Rasoulof has been feted around the world for his daring critiques of authoritarianism and social injustices in his home country. Goodbye, from 2011, which chronicles the struggles of a lawyer trying to flee Iran, won the prize for directing in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.
Six years later the director won the top prize in the same competition for A Man of Integrity, a depiction of corruption and resistance in an Iranian village.
There Is No Evil, his 2020 film intertwining four experiences of the death penalty in Iran, won the Golden Bear at Berlin International Film Festival.
I had this chance encounter with a senior prison official who told me how much he’s come to hate himself and how much his family were criticising him
Rasoulof was unable to accept the award, as Tehran promptly banned There Is No Evil; the courts sentenced the director to a year in prison and banned him from making films for two years for “propaganda against the system”. That sentence is one of many.
The director served a year in prison in 2010, allegedly for filming without the correct permit. In 2017 his passport was confiscated. (Last year, when he arrived in Germany, authorities had to identify him using his fingerprints from a previous visit.)
In 2019 the Islamic revolutionary court again sentenced him to a year in prison, banned him from travelling for two years and barred him from participating in social or political activities.
Rasoulof drew the character of Iman from life, basing him in particular on a prison officer the film-maker encountered while checking on the health of a fellow political prisoner who was on hunger strike in Evin Prison in Tehran.
“I had all these dealings with people in the Iranian regime – security apparatus, interrogators, judges, prosecutors, you name it,” Rasoulof says. “I was constantly questioning myself. I was constantly questioning what enabled them to think and act that way. What distinguished me from those who submit to power? How do you become cut off from your own humanity?
“I was arrested and imprisoned just as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began. Then I had this chance encounter with a senior prison official who told me how much he’s come to hate himself – he even wanted to take his own life – and how much his family and children were questioning and criticising him for working and collaborating with that prison.
“That’s when I first thought it would be very interesting to work on a story about a family divided by that rift. It would also allow me to pursue this question that had stayed with me and was alive for me after all these years.”
The Seed of the Sacred Fig alerts us that repression starts at home. For the director, the personal and political coalesced into a dangerous guerrilla production. He directed the film remotely, using Apple’s FaceTime service. He avoided using mobile phones and ATMs, lest his location be detected. An innocuous fake script was presented for police spot checks and inspections.
It was a horrible experience, that sense of being incapacitated. The anger at the absurdity of it all. Just because you want to make a film
Once Cannes unveiled its selection of films, Iranian authorities interrogated the cast and crew and banned them from leaving the country.
“We did become suspicious of all the people around us,” the director says of his small, covert cast and crew. “We were wondering who they were. We were wondering if people were following or keeping tabs. You don’t want to think that way. But it’s inescapable when you work this way.
“You do have to take extreme precautions. You have to consider the wellbeing of the people you are working with. I have been arrested a number of times. At the start of any potential collaboration I would talk about that possibility, and I would always try to present the experience as accurately as possible.”
Four weeks into the secret Tehran shoot Rasoulof received yet another sentence: eight years in prison, a flogging and the confiscation of his assets.
“It was a very confusing day,” he says. “I had no idea what to do. I was all over the place. I contacted my lawyers and asked them if they were to appeal how long would it take until I received a final sentence? Their guess was it could take about two months to appeal, and that would run into a few weeks of the Persian new year.
“I realised I had two months to complete this shoot – and, luckily, we were able to complete it in that time. It was a horrible experience, that sense of being incapacitated and not knowing how to proceed. The anger at the absurdity of it all. Just because you want to make a film.”
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is in cinemas from Friday
