\n<\/p>\n
When Iman shows his wife, Najmeh, his new gun, it comes with the news that he\u2019s been promoted to the post of investigating prosecutor in Iran\u2019s judiciary. He needs the gun for security, he says. Yet he\u2019s also proud of the power his masters have given him. Or have they really taken it away?<\/p>\n
The moment comes early in Mohammad Rasoulof\u2019s new film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig<\/em>, which won the Special Prize at Cannes last year and is among the first to dramatise the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Rasoulof was jailed in Iran more than once because of his films. In April 2024 he fled the country on foot to escape an eight-year prison sentence.<\/p>\n Iman\u2019s first task is to sign a death sentence without reading the defendant\u2019s file. (\u2018Death sentences are overwhelming,\u2019 he\u2019ll say later, when forced to process them in bulk.) He tries to insist that he can\u2019t rubber-stamp an execution without knowing the facts. But he\u2019s expected to obey.<\/p>\n \u2018I didn\u2019t try to make Iman similar to the regime,\u2019 Rasoulof told me in London, when I asked if he stood in for the Islamic Republic. \u2018I tried to focus on a character who is used to obeying a system, is used to submitting himself to power, and whose ambitions and desires and dreams lead him to the greatest violence of which he is capable.\u2019<\/p>\n The Seed of the Sacred Fig<\/em> is set in late 2022, soon after morality police killed Jina Mahsa Amini in custody. Tehran is surging with protests. Najmeh and her daughters peek from behind the curtains to glimpse events outside. The daughters know their father\u2019s work is \u2018sensitive\u2019 and they can\u2019t join the protests. But then a schoolfriend is shot in the eye during a crackdown. The family argues over the truth of what\u2019s going on, with the girls following social media \u2013 Rasoulof intercuts actual smartphone footage of the protests \u2013 and the parents parroting state television.<\/p>\n \u2018I have this need to tell stories in the closest possible way to reality, without hiding anything, without any self-censorship,\u2019 Rasoulof told me, calling it a matter of \u2018dignity\u2019. \u2018Otherwise you feel you become the means of spreading lies.\u2019<\/p>\n For several months in 2022 and 2023, I edited English translations of reports of young Iranian protesters who\u2019d been blinded. I looked at dozens of photos of punctured, swollen, bleeding eyes. Hundreds of people were injured in this way. Some months ago, an Iranian woman described the Islamic Republic to me as a \u2018wild animal\u2019 that thinks it\u2019s right, that thinks it knows everything, but knows nothing and cannot be rational.<\/p>\n Towards the end of the film, Najmeh tells her daughters that she\u2019s been hiding their father\u2019s \u2018true colours\u2019 for years. Najmeh is \u2018on a trapeze\u2019, Rasoulof said. The traditional family dynamics mean the mother is \u2018doing this huge balancing act, to keep the family together\u2019, helping her daughters while still defending her indefensible husband. And while Rasoulof would like the film \u2018to remain the story of a family\u2019, he accepts there is \u2018a certain layer of power that does everything it can to maintain the status quo\u2019.<\/p>\n \u2018People who work in that system slowly drown,\u2019 he said. \u2018They become removed from themselves, foreigners to themselves.\u2019 Iranian officials \u2018hand their head over to someone else\u2019, as a Persian expression has it, \u2018and the system continues because of those people.\u2019 \u2018Submission to power is complex, it depends on other people submitting to power, and it has deep roots.\u2019<\/p>\n Ficus religiosa<\/em>, the sacred fig tree, grows on other trees before plunging its roots into the ground and enveloping its host. The film ends with a sequence that suggests Iran\u2019s rulers and its people are both chasing and fleeing from each other. But there is also a fresh planting, new roots overtaking old ones, against a backdrop that suggests a vision of patriarchy \u2018collapsing within the system it created\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n