The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Having fled Iran after being given an eight-year prison sentence for his filmmaking, director Mohammad Rasoulof releases this blistering critique of his nation's corrupt regime centred on tensions within a family unit
Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a portrait of three women who live in the shadow of their family’s patriarch. The film opens with Iman (Missagh Zareh) being appointed as an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran; it's a role that will earn him a significantly higher salary and allow him to move his family to a bigger house in a better community. Iman has toiled as a lawyer for years and sees this as his overdue reward, but his more high-profile role comes with dangers. “You must be irreproachable,” his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) warns their teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki).
Rasoulof presents this quartet as a microcosm of the Iranian state. Iman demands absolute loyalty from his wife and daughters, but fissures in the family unit have begun to appear. Iman’s daughters have become emboldened through their exposure to social media and have started to question the status quo, with their peers engaged in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that exploded in Iran in 2022 (Rasoulof cuts vivid real-life footage of these protests and the regime's brutal crackdown on them into his film). When Iman’s government-issue gun goes missing he quickly suspects those closest to him, even employing state-level interrogation techniques to extract a confession.
It would be easy to paint Iman as a draconian brute – and his actions are often beyond the pale – but Rasoulof and Zareh have created a character who's more nuanced; Iman is a man who is part of an unforgiving system and whose actions are driven by a sense of fear, shame and vulnerability.
On his first day in his new position, he discovers that one of his duties is to sign off on death sentences for crimes that he hasn’t had time to investigate, and he is deeply troubled by this, but he knows that if he doesn’t comply there will soon be whispers about his loyalty to the regime. Rasoulof takes the time to find the shades in each of his characters and to allow his actors the room to give remarkably nuanced and touching performances. Soheila Golestani is magnificent as Najmeh, a woman whose whole life has been devoted to supporting her husband, but who finds herself increasingly torn by her desire to protect her daughters.
Ultimately, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is not really about the rights and wrongs of these individuals. It’s a direct attack on a corrupt and oppressive regime that strangles its people, just like the ficus religiosa of the title. Similarly to Rasoulof's previous feature, There Is No Evil, The Seed of the Sacred Fig was shot secretly and smuggled out of Iran at great risk by a filmmaker whose career has already been marked by numerous prison sentences and filmmaking bans. Having been under house arrest because of his filmmaking since early 2023, Rasoulof fled his homeland in May 2024 following a sentence of flogging and eight years’ imprisonment. He is now exiled from the country he has documented so unsparingly, but The Seed of the Sacred Fig stands as a vital act of defiance.
Released 7 Feb by Lionsgate; certificate 15