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The Regime at Home and The Seed of the Sacred Fig

The Sacred Fig, though aesthetically pretty, is known for its invasiveness. It will grow near and fast enough to another tree that its roots will overtake it like a weed, eventually suffocating the original tree. It is a part of the fig’s nature, along with its adaptability; and it’s no wonder that director Mohammad Rasoulof would liken it to the Iranian regime choking out the nation of Iran itself. His metaphor is certainly supported by firsthand experience -he has served prison time for critiquing that regime, and besides that has been arrested multiple times for crimes of “propaganda against the state”. For The Seed of the Sacred Fig, his latest movie, he has been sentenced to eight years -and is fleeing that sentence in exile in Germany. The film, unsurprisingly, has been banned in Iran. They don’t want you to see this.
And that should be reason enough to watch it, a movie that examines a crisis in modern Iran, both political and social, and as the title suggests points to some ray of hope for the future in spite of a lot of grimness in the present. It is set during the Mahsa Amini protests of 2022-23, that were sparked when a young woman died suspiciously in police custody. A movement began, particularly among young and college-educated people that was met with violent suppression from government entities -considered the country’s biggest crisis since the Islamic Revolt.
In the midst of this is Iman (Missagh Zareh), a lawyer who has suddenly been appointed an investigating judge with the Revolutionary Court, tasked with simply handing out sentences passed down to him by his superiors in the government. Given the sensitivity of the position, he is not allowed to disclose much to his family, and they are required to be anonymous lest they all be put in danger. But his work comes into direct conflict with the burgeoning activist ideals of his daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), while his largely doting wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) is left in the middle.
Interspersed throughout the movie is real camera, news, and cell phone footage of the protests as they were happening, and damning scenes of police brutality. Rasoulof splices them into the story organically -with one record of a crackdown at a college campus directly preceding Rezvan bringing her friend Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi) into the home, she having been violently assaulted while endeavouring to make her way around the protests. Apart from this kind of footage we don’t see any of the violence recreated, or even much of Tehran at all outside of the family home or Iman’s office -and later in the film, the country. Yet the immediacy of the violence and the boiling over of tensions within the family is conveyed with aggressive starkness.
Though Iman is introduced first as protagonist, with this moral compromise as a source of some real psychological conflict -the movie ultimately becomes way more about his wife and daughters, the younger girls becoming more and more ideologically distant as their feelings and experiences clash dramatically with their parents’ rhetoric and blind devotion to the regime. The protests depicted were considered as much a generational conflict as an ideological one, and here Rasalouf shows emphatically what that growing divide is. The girls, especially Rezvan, become more and more outspoken in their opinions, as their parents resist the sensible questions of why reporters won’t talk to the protesters if they’re supposedly just fed ideology by foreign agitators or where the religious justification is stated for certain draconian laws, especially around the wearing of hijabs. And of course the parents can only evade and assert the girls are too young to know better.
Rasalouf is very much on their side, but he doesn’t caricature the adults’ view or present them as entirely unsympathetic. Not in the case of Najmeh at least. Where Iman totally insulates himself in his job from its moral compromises, his wife isn’t able to do the same and faces a gruelling inner battle between her convictions as she has always accepted them, and her love for her daughters -making her modestly open to their emotions in spite of herself. And it’s a wonderful performance from Golestani, playing a woman gradually coming to understand both her daughters and the uncomfortable truths of the system she is living under, even if she may not ever fully accept it. Rostami is really good too, each intelligent remark and nuance of her own radicalization coming out with conviction, and Maleki makes for an unexpected powerhouse late in the film. Rasalouf is proud to see in girls like these the future of Iran, in spite of the ultimate failure of this particular revolution. The family is his microcosm of the nation, each member representing a different tenet of political thought (ultimately, Sana may be the most fascinating).
But the movie doesn’t solely concern itself with difficult family politics, symbolic or brazen, during a time of upheaval, and in fact becomes a more straight-laced thriller with the sudden disappearance of Iman’s gun, given to him when he got the job for his own safety, and the loss of which, in lieu of the extreme security concerns of the moment, could mean the end of his job. And so threatened, Iman immediately suspects someone in his family, thus sparking the more visceral conflict between them that ratchets severely out of control. There is nary a sign of harmonious reconciliation, as Rasalouf explores with stunning believability just how steadfast both convictions and righteous stubbornness can be; lines are marked in the sand and crossed in deeply troubling ways that there is no coming back from. Rasalouf enhances the paranoia meticulously, in so doing demonstrating an aptness for a more universal kind of intensity -in fact the final section of the movie goes so far in terms of the escalated horror of Iman's lost mind and the danger to his family that it resembles The Shining (even including a maze of sorts). The gun mystery comes to a head and the climax unfolds in a gripping fashion until it reaches a place where that metaphor is at fever pitch -you can see where Rasalouf expects these tensions to go, what the seed of the sacred fig will grow into. And that is why the Iranian regime is so afraid of this movie.
Rostami and Maleki were able to join Rasalouf at the movie's premiere in Cannes. Golestani and Zareh, unable to leave Iran, were not -photographs were held in their stead. There are genuine worries that they and some of the crew who have not managed to escape will be used to coerce Rasalouf back. The Seed of the Sacred Fig was a dangerous film to make, but an essential one too -a defiant act of protest in itself, shining a spotlight on both the crimes of a state in desperation and the changing tides of political thought in its people; as inspiring as it is engaging. It may be difficult for Rasalouf to continue making films about Iran but I hope he will one day be allowed to return home and express himself with a freedom his people so clearly crave.

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