The functionary Iman’s promotion to investigating magistrate in the court of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards coincides with the outbreak of street protests, hundreds of arrests a day, and summary sentencing in The Seed of the Sacred Fig. And it proves to be a dirty job that puts his family at risk.
This basically successful cross between the social and political drama of real-life Iran and an exciting, bankable story is Mohammad Rasoulof’s first film in Cannes competition, after his 2020 episode film against capital punishment, There Is No Evil, won the Golden Bear in Berlin.
Here the focus is on the violent government crackdown on the Women Life Freedom movement, following the death in custody of young Mahsa Amini, accused of not wearing her head covering correctly. Shooting the film without permission and in secret, Rasoulof was able to incorporate real footage of street violence shot on bystanders’ cell phones, which is ably whipped into a fictional drama centered on Iman’s growing paranoia and disintegrating family. Building slowly, the story morphs into a thriller, and finally a sort of horror film, though these parts feel more like decent imitations than real genre work.
The director’s previous films, including Goodbye (2011), Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013) and A Man of Integrity (2017) — all of which made their festival bow in Un Certain Regard — have consistently locked horns with Iran’s strict censors, earning the director jail time from July 2022 to February 2023 as well as a ban on his leaving the country. Having been notified of a new case against him and then a sentence of eight years in prison plus flogging, he fled Iran last week. He was able to attend the Cannes premiere of Sacred Fig, earning the condemnation of Iran’s official government media.
To get down to the film, which clocks in at almost 3 hours (but they fly by), its ambitions are clear: to denounce the Islamic regime and its privileged minions in unequivocal terms. This means shedding the usual veiled symbolism that tries to circumvent censorship in Iran, and telling it directly like it is. The only heavy Persian symbol is the title itself, which is explained as an invasive seed dropped by birds on other trees which, as it sprouts and grows aerial roots, strangles the host tree. It is not hard to guess the writer-director is talking about Iran’s theocratic, authoritarian regime and its devastating strangle-hold on civil society.
Iman (played as a mild-mannered workaholic by Misssagh Zareh) is an honest man at the beginning of the film, a bureaucrat working in the legal offices of the hardline Revolutionary Guard. When he gets promoted to investigating magistrate, just one step behind being a judge which is his career goal, he and his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) are in heaven. But paradise is short-lived. The first thing he is asked to do is sign an indictment for a death sentence, without even reading the accused man’s file. As his friend and colleague Ghaderi (Reza Akhlaghirad) tells him, the Prosecutor wants it done — otherwise he’s out of the job before he begins.
Anguishing moral dilemmas are a mainstay of the finest Iranian cinema from Kiarostami to Farhadi, but here it is pretty obvious Iman will cave and act against his conscience. Najmeh is too excited about moving to a bigger apartment where her college-age daughter Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and the younger sib Sana (Setaareh Maleki) won’t have to share a room. Filled with maternal righteousness, she impresses on them the need to adopt a new reserved, conservative lifestyle and to avoid mentioning their father’s “sensitive” job. It turns our Najmeh’s brother also has a sensitive job, that of Revolutionary Guard interrogator, and later in the film he will bring his skills to bear on all three women.
The first blow to this tightly wound family comes from Rezvan’s best friend Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi). The two girls are together in their college dorm when police break in and shoot Sadaf in the eye with buckshot. Najmeh, who is horrified at the idea of a scandal, surprises everyone when she picks it out of the girl’s bloody face pellet by pellet with determined sangfroid, a scene set to the music of a female vocalist singing a lament.
One important plot point is stressed more than in a police thriller: Iman has got a gun. He was given the service weapon for self-defense: given that he will be signing a lot of death warrants, reprisals are to be expected. When the gun disappears one day, he is in hot water, and risks three years in prison if his bosses find out. While real protesters and police clash on cell phone videos, Iman launches his own war on his family with a full-scale search for the gun that breaks the family apart with accusations and suspicions.
It’s clear than the man is close to cracking, and he does so in the third and last part, which shifts gears again into family horror mode. Confiscating his wife and daughters’ phones, he drives them at breakneck speed through desert valleys and mountains to an abandoned house behind a walled yard. It isn’t quite Jack and the Overlook Hotel, but those are the vibes as Iman, in the thrall of paranoia, takes them prisoner. The final scene takes place in an area of ancient rock dwellings and has an undeniable excitement, though an experienced action director could have gotten more out of it.
Middle East audiences, instead, may get more out of the film’s subtleties, like Rasoulof’s final shot of an arm extended out of the rubble and a hand wearing a ring, a deliberate nod at the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2020. It reads like the hope of a terrorized people to bury their oppressors. But international audiences are unlikely to grasp political parallels like these.
The Iran-Germany-French production is being released in the U.S. by Neon.
Director, screenplay: Mohammad Rasoulof
Cast: Misagh Zare, Sohelia Golestani, Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki, Niousha Akhshi, Reza Akhlaghi, Shiva Ordooei, Amineh Arani
Producers: Mohammad Rasoulof, Amin Sadraei, Jean-Christophe Simon, Mani Tilgner, Rozita Hendijanian
Cinematography: Pooyan Aghababaei
Music: Karzan Mahmood
Production companies: MOIN Filmforderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein, Run Way Pictures (Germany), Parallel 45 (Germany), Arte France Cinéma
World Sales: Films Boutique
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Farsi
168 minutes
