‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ is a Defiant Cinematic Masterpiece

It’s a powerfully directed political polemic, a tense tale that examines Iranian society through the intimacy of a family and keeps us on the edge of our seats for almost three hours.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, The Seed of the Sacred Fig tells the story of a comfortable Teheran family, a couple and their two teenage daughters. Iman, the father, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard, is about to take up a position he has long dreamed of as an examining magistrate. 

Teheran is in the throes of a social and political crisis. The streets are abuzz with protests following the death of 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin student Mahsa Amini, who died in suspicious circumstances in 2022 while in police custody for inappropriately wearing the hijab.

While Iman spends most of his time handing down death sentences without trial or investigation, his wife and daughters discover the reality of the regime’s violent repression. One day, Iman’s service weapon, a symbol of his social success which he must always have at hand, disappears. 

His suspicions turn to his family, who are subjected to his increasingly vindictive rule. Behind the family’s closed doors, but in front of Rasoulof’s camera, the family transforms into a microcosm of Iranian society under control. 

Beautifully shot on film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is interspersed with video footage of demonstrations, police violence and arrests, shot clandestinely with an iPhone, giving the film a quasi-documentary quality. Its actors have been investigated by the state, but despite this, they have chosen to participate in order to carry out their urgent message.

Surveilled by the Mullah regime for several years for his critical and subversive cinema, Rasoulof persists in denouncing the government with this film, particularly the repression of the Women, Life, Freedom movement – at great risk to his own life. Sentenced in May to eight years in prison and flogging for “collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the country’s security,” he secretly fled that same month, and now lives in exile.

The Seeds of the Wild Fig follows A Man of Integrity (winner of the Prix Un certain regard at Cannes in 2017) and There Is No Evil (winner of the Golden Bear at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival), both of which brought Rasoulof international recognition, but which the Tehran regime detested.

Indeed, it was after the premiere of A Man of Integrity that Rasoulof was officially deprived of his freedom to make films in Iran. To get around the censors, he decided to make There Is No Evil clandestinely as four shorts, of which he was not technically the director. (In Iran, censors have less control over short films.)

Above all, The Seed of the Sacred Fig should not be reduced solely to its political message, though Rasoulof recognizes the unrivalled power of real footage to send his message on the reality of the situation in Iran. Rasoulof signs a work of extraordinary cinematic mastery, splendid and implacable, whose powerful aesthetic is on a par with its political content, putting cinema at the service of revolt. 

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is in French cinemas on September 18.