Few films in recent memory have undergone a production process that rivals the dramatic material of the work itself quite like Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed and the Sacred Fig.
Even fewer filmmakers have faced an eight year prison sentence, plus flogging, on account of their life’s work. Earlier this year, the Iranian regime levied charges of “collusion against national security” at the fifty-one year old filmmaker, citing a resume that has ceaselessly criticized the theocracy’s vise grip on the people of Iran. His commitment to delivering biting cinematic appraisals of autocracy have in turn made him no stranger to the country’s court system, where injunctions and previous prison sentences have harried Rasoulof at nearly every artistic turn (reminiscent of Jafar Panahi, another heralded, prison-weary regime target who landed behind bars, on this occasion, for speaking out in support of his fellow countryman). This dogged odyssey culminated at Cannes’ this past spring, where the film’s well received debut coincided with its director’s official exile.
Rasoulof and his cast spent roughly seventy days between December 2023 until March 2024 shooting the film in total secrecy. Halfway through the shoot, the auteur learned of his impending prison sentence – hastening production and impelling the director to flee the country upon the production’s completion, shuttling between far-flung rural villages by car before rounding off the final stretch on foot across the Iranian border. The film itself was smuggled to Hamburg, where editor Andrew Bird made quick and thorough work of the footage, finally making its way to the south of France for the highly anticipated premiere. The Seed made waves at Cannes, taking home the FIPRESCI prize in what was almost certainly a unanimous decision for the International Federation of Film Critics. A twelve minute standing ovation was likely but a small consolation for the cast and crew who’d completed the daring escape – lead actors Soheila Golestani and Missagh Zareh were banned from leaving the country, having been subjected to restrictions of movement as decreed by the regime.
Hamptons International Film Festival’s screening of The Seed and the Sacred Fig was met with a bit less fanfare, but a nonetheless rapt and somber audience. The opening title scene quieted any of the theater’s remaining whispers, cutting a clear thematic path for the allegorical narrative as it called attention to the title’s reference, the ficus religiosa – a species of fig that proliferates its seed by “wrapping…around another tree and eventually strangling it.” From here, Rasoulof fixes his lens upon the dynamics of patriarchal dysfunction as symbolic fertile ground for the malevolent seed in question. Pious muslim Iman, a dutiful image of Iran’s judicial-bureaucratic striver class, is a recently promoted inspector for the regime’s religious court. Tasked with reviewing the court’s growing backlog of death sentences, he soon learns that his role is not one of rigorous legal discernment but rather ruthless political expediency – innocent Iranians be damned. With his religious principles tested, the apparatchik’s guilty conscience is soothed by his own tendentious appeals to the very principles themselves – a mere instrument of his government, Iman – as a corollary – is simply a righteous extension of God’s will. The domestic arena is no less trying for the beleaguered official, where widespread student protests hit close to home, both literally and figuratively, for his two daughters Sana and Rezvan – provoking a particularly dangerous brand of familial discontent. The camera’s exploration of this generational schism nods to Farhadi and Kiarostami, here deploying the kind of methodical social realism that’s become something of a calling card of Iranian cinema.
Such conventions are left by the wayside when Iman’s service weapon goes missing (in an all-time conceptual explosion of Chekhov’s gun) and the narrative departs Tehran for more rugged and experimental territory. The dissolution of family drama into an elevated plane of symbolic internecine conflict comprises the tense and dreamlike third act, where the regime is dealt its final blow in the form of a confrontation between Iman, his family, and the literal archaic structural institutions of a once great empire. It’s a bold thread that Rasoulof powerfully weaves across the various dimensions of societal decomposition, where the sacred fig is reimagined as a paranoid and self-destructive phenomenon in the face of an ineluctable, female-lead resistance. The film can be seen as the diagnosis of a future but imminent downfall; a precise depiction of a system that is subject to the entropic physics of its own insecure logic.
