How are we so certain that the law, and the God who makes it, is right?
Director Mohammad Rasoulof is a fugitive from Iran, where his feature film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, takes place. He is a vocal dissident of his country’s politics, as the film evidences, and he was punished in his country by flogging and the imposition of a prison sentence. Rasoulof lives in Europe as an exile. The Cannes Film Festival organisers selected The Seed of the Sacred Fig to compete for the Palme d’Or in 2024. Following the announcement, Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years of imprisonment and flogging. Since, The Seed of the Sacred Fig has been nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 2025 Oscars, which will be awarded on the 3rd of March.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an intimate family drama set against a backdrop of political unrest, an eventuality which consumes them. The familial archetypes are familiar. Najmeh’s stern and furrowed brows, her discerning and, at times, livid eyes are the hallmarks of a loving and overbearing mother. Her children Sana and Rezan share an unabashedly sisterly love in the likes of a feel-good sitcom episode. The protectiveness of a Muslim mother is tested on the fine balance between her children’s wellbeing, and surrendering them to the wishes of her husband and God.
A gun, not yet fired, in Iman’s pocket, is the instigator of the conflict. Iman, father and husband, is a devout lawyer appointed as an investigating judge by the Revolutionary Court in Tehran. His ascension up the ladder of success in a government job — the most coveted jobs in developing nations — mirrors his journey to be closer to God. Iman, whose name translates to ‘faith’, finds his faith tested when his hand is forced by his superior, a Prosecutor General, to sign death warrants: “hundreds a day,” Iman says. After drowning daily in a bloody sea of paperwork, Iman returns his government mandated gun to his nightstand.
Since 1979, it is mandatory for Iranian women to wear the hijab. Violence has been meted out generously against those opposing the ban. The injustice of punishment and brutality against Mahsa Amini leads the young girls Sana and Rezvan to question the imposition of the hijab itself: why is this God’s law? Mahsa Amini was beaten by police upon her arrest for ‘improperly’ wearing her hijab, and began to suffer complications at the police station. Najmeh faithfully parrots the television’s lies: Amini had underlying heart complications, died of a stroke, and besides… she shouldn’t have been dressed like that.
The highlights of the screenplay were the girls’ questions. Their questions bit right to the very core of injustice that Iman enables in his job as an executioner, and their mother enables in her parenting. “How long will you defend Father? You’ve spent your whole life defending him.” Their father is, like all fathers, a God on Earth for both his wife and children. Iman is never a cartoonish villain, even when the movie devolves into a labyrinth of his paranoia where his girls and wife are trapped. Iman is against their questioning, following God’s commandments of “surrender…devotion…unquestioning faith and obedience. At least that’s how Iman puts it.
The film walks/straddles the line between a family drama and thriller, but is marketed as a horror film. Somehow, the blend of sentimental family comedy/drama and suspenseful horror reflects the tightrope that families strained by normalised abuse, walk on. The violence on the streets gradually permeates this sheltered family’s home, and is eventually espoused by all of its characters, sparing no victims. Like the universal experience of the pandemic, the girls are cloistered in their apartment as soon as the protests break out. The apartment, its windows, its curtains, become tangible ideology: the paranoia of visibility controls their lives since political unrest.
Najmeh, mother and wife, leans out of the window in horror to discover that even her neighbours are protesting against the government’s tyranny and police brutality. As she leans into the open air, precariously falling outside the window, she is vulnerable and full of dangerous potential. It is like Najmeh tastes the freedom that her very neighbours are yelling slogans for —– but is interrupted by Iman coming home.
The film was long. I felt the pacing hindered the film’s ultimate climax, and stifled its potency as a thriller. However, it reflected all the stages of realisation in a revolution faithfully. The simmering conflict was told through social media clips viewed on the girls’ phones, found footage spliced into the film, and news reels. Finally, it followed them as they attempted to escape the conflict by fleeing to Iran’s hills in Iman’s hometown. In the name of God, Iman attempts to uncover the ‘liar’ who stole his gun, punishing his family for the sin of ‘lying’. Iman, who has hid his vocation as an executioner from his family, staves off the guilt of lying and signing death duties by accusing his family of sabotaging his career: he faces three years of imprisonment if he doesn’t retrieve the gun. Ultimately, Iman is motivated by the feeling of ‘humiliation of being told a lie by his family’. The finger you use to point at your family in blame is, after all, made of the very flesh and blood that they are.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a commendable meditation on guilt and faith. Its cast and crew have been interrogated, intimidated, and banned from leaving Iran by its authorities. Director Rasoulof completed a 28-day journey fleeing Iran before showing at the Cannes red carpet holding photographs of Soheila Golestani (Najmeh) and Missagh Zareh (Iman), actors who have been banned from travelling. The film echoes Rilke’s hope: Love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue… live in the questions.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig was released on 27th February 2025.
