THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (2024)

An investigating judge grapples with paranoia amid political unrest in Tehran...

by James Lee 7th February 20258th February 2025 Leave a reply

It’s impossible to discuss Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig / دانه‌ی انجیر معابد without acknowledging the long, disturbing, and storied history of Iranian filmmakers coming under authoritarian threat—including mavericks such as Jafar Panahi and Mostafa Aleahmad—which reached another harrowing chapter with Rasoulof’s most recent arrest. Following the announcement in May 2024 that Sacred Fig would be participating in competition at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Islamic Republic sentenced him to eight years in prison, whippings, confiscation of his property, and a substantial fine. Immediately, a clamorous uproar erupted from the entire international cinematic community, and Rasoulof eventually fled to a safe house in Germany, evading arrest and attending the Cannes premiere with only a few other fugitive members of the cast and crew to help support Sacred Fig.

As evidenced by the repeated attempts at his arrest by the Iranian government, Rasoulof is no stranger to creating this kind of fierce filmic indictment of the authoritarian rule he escaped from. Those not already familiar with Rasoulof’s name may well recognise him as the Golden Bear-winning filmmaker behind There Is No Evil (2020), an anthology film containing four separate anecdotes about the consequences of the Iranian death penalty; a full-fronted interrogation of who administers it, who is responsible for pulling the trigger, the ripples of devastation it leaves on entire families, and the moral dubiousness of the philosophical arguments that support it. And even before that particular film, Rasoulof has repeatedly been singled out by the Iranian authorities for his creation of “propaganda against the system”. A single look at the ten films he’s offered in his 24-year-long career makes it easy to see exactly how and why he’s repeatedly drawn the ire of one of the most repressive regimes of our current times.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig demonstrates once more Rasoulof’s great penchant for containing his anger within the framework of a cinematic statement. Rasoulof’s deeply courageous escape from Iran and attendance at Cannes alone is a powerful statement of his dedication to the activist impact of the cinematic medium. That ethos is fittingly supplemented by the fact that Fig explicitly functions as a protest film, consumed with incendiary anti-authoritarian anger, and a direct commentary on the aftershocks of the protests that followed Mahsa Amini’s murder at the hands of the Iranian government’s morality police. Even in terms of its most ostensible face, the importance of Sacred Fig’s ideas of Iranian theocracy, its intersections with misogyny, and the resistance against both are undeniable. Yet the film is also an intriguingly ambitious, subversive participant in the realistic tradition of modern Iranian cinema (à la the winding, Chekhovian tales spun by Asghar Farhadi), a realistically grounded psychological tale of ambivalence and paranoia that eventually morphs into an allegory of clearly defined symbols and terms.

Rasoulof’s film revolves around a family whose patriarch, Iman (Missagh Zareh), has just been promoted to a position as an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court of Tehran—a huge increase in both salary and living space for him and his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Goestani), and two daughters, Sana (Setareh Maleki) and Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami). We’re first introduced to Iman as both a devout and honest man, and a test of character emerges when he eventually learns that the purposes of his new legal power are much more dubious than initially expected. Despite his moral alignment, the protests against the Iranian government following Mahsa Amini’s death have prompted brutal and significant crackdowns from ruling authorities, forcing judges like Iman to unquestioningly sign arrest warrants, judgments, and even death sentences without anything resembling due process. He isn’t allowed to talk about his work to his family; he’s issued a handgun in the instance that someone doxxes him and comes after his residence; and his work is generally and totally sequestered from his usual motions of life, setting the foundations of paranoia that begin to steadily infect the film’s narrative.

Rezvan and Sana have a particular vantage point regarding the protests that their father doesn’t—social media. The anti-government protests that erupt all around them are painstakingly documented in mobile phone videos by their peers and fellow citizens, and Rasoulof makes the striking choice to directly edit those videos straight into the text of the film, allowing us to witness the real-life horrors of the government’s brutalities against the protestors’ continued resistance alongside the two sisters, whose gradual radicalisation comes at odds with the growing devotion to the system that Iman begins to demonstrate and that Najmeh is begrudgingly forced to abide by. But the threat of the protests and all that surrounds them eventually comes home. One of Rezvan and Sana’s friends, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), is shot in the face with buckshot during an anti-compulsory-hijab protest, requiring the three women of the family to medically take care of her in a distressingly emotional and tensely filmed sequence, before Iman’s imminent arrival from work. And then, the handgun that Iman was issued—a weapon that he goes so far as to inadvertently leave behind in laundry baskets, unaware of how to securely store it away—completely disappears from view, setting off a chain of events built on escalating horrors.

Therein lies the centrepiece of the majority of The Seed of the Sacred Fig—a piercingly dramatic and paranoiac exploration of how a family inextricably linked to the social movements of their authoritarian country turns against each other, framed predominantly within the family’s domestic residence that grows into a battleground as fierce as the protests outside. Formally, the film is a relatively straightforward affair. Cinematographer Pooyan Aghababaei’s framing choices are clinical and clear-cut, occasionally deviating into an athletically shot oner that emphasises the escalating tension of the proverbial walls closing in. Also within the film’s visual language are detours into intimately drawn-out close-ups that attempt to emphasise some kind of poetry, as evidenced by how they’re generally supplemented by crooning, ostensibly religious vocals. Some of these tricks leave more of a noted impression than others. The film’s most consistent arena of intentionality and success is in its more straight-faced realism as well as how it frames the growing complexity of its increasingly troubled domestic situation, and its more stylised deviations tend to draw out the film’s length.

That same phrase and frame of mind can also be applied to the film’s narrative framework. As the film’s nail-biting slow-burn escalates, its ethos seems to literally change form. The push-pull of its initial dynamics is exchanged for a more rigidly established allegory, barrelling towards a thriller-esque conceit—replete with car chases and a Western-esque staging of a final sequence of pursuit that culminates in a bluntly polemic final image—whose simplicity in attempting to morph this family into a microcosm of current Iranian political tensions is a relative stretch of plausibility, and feels as if it comes at the expense of some of the narrative thorniness established earlier. There is an evident attempt at bringing audiences into a more nebulous dramatic realm, a symbolic-realistic meld that brings the typical flow of more dramatically airtight Iranian films to a more elevated narrative space. To the extent that it works, however, it’s only really in the fact that Rasoulof’s eye for tension is so exceptional that his comprehension for ratcheting up stakes doesn’t completely lose its hold over the audience, even as the balance it toes between those modes of storytelling threatens to lose its way.

Who would ever deny, however, the absolute courage of The Seed of Sacred Fig’s existence as an anti-authoritarian endeavour? Beneath the rage that motivates its epic polemic against the Iranian government’s iron fist is a profound solidarity with Iran’s feminist causes, led by the younger generations striving for a future without authoritarian-masculine influence, inclusive of the older generations of women whose traditionalism has been rigidly conditioned, and opposed by the men in power whose abuses of influence are byproducts of their victimisation, as well. Rasoulof’s victory against the authoritarianism that threatened to silence him—in his escape from Iran, and in the release of the film whose covert existence the government saw as an ideological threat—remains one of the greatest moral triumphs of world cinema of the past several decades. Solely based on its existence, The Seed of the Sacred Fig remains a testament to art as activism and resistance that irrefutably contributes to, and derives from, real-world impact.