‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’

When Iman shows his wife, Najmeh, his new gun, it comes with the news that he’s been promoted to the post of investigating prosecutor in Iran’s judiciary. He needs the gun for security, he says. Yet he’s also proud of the power his masters have given him. Or have they really taken it away?

The moment comes early in Mohammad Rasoulof’s new film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, 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.

Iman’s first task is to sign a death sentence without reading the defendant’s file. (‘Death sentences are overwhelming,’ he’ll say later, when forced to process them in bulk.) He tries to insist that he can’t rubber-stamp an execution without knowing the facts. But he’s expected to obey.

‘I didn’t try to make Iman similar to the regime,’ Rasoulof told me in London, when I asked if he stood in for the Islamic Republic. ‘I 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.’

The Seed of the Sacred Fig 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’s work is ‘sensitive’ and they can’t join the protests. But then a schoolfriend is shot in the eye during a crackdown. The family argues over the truth of what’s going on, with the girls following social media – Rasoulof intercuts actual smartphone footage of the protests – and the parents parroting state television.

‘I have this need to tell stories in the closest possible way to reality, without hiding anything, without any self-censorship,’ Rasoulof told me, calling it a matter of ‘dignity’. ‘Otherwise you feel you become the means of spreading lies.’

For several months in 2022 and 2023, I edited English translations of reports of young Iranian protesters who’d 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 ‘wild animal’ that thinks it’s right, that thinks it knows everything, but knows nothing and cannot be rational.

Towards the end of the film, Najmeh tells her daughters that she’s been hiding their father’s ‘true colours’ for years. Najmeh is ‘on a trapeze’, Rasoulof said. The traditional family dynamics mean the mother is ‘doing this huge balancing act, to keep the family together’, helping her daughters while still defending her indefensible husband. And while Rasoulof would like the film ‘to remain the story of a family’, he accepts there is ‘a certain layer of power that does everything it can to maintain the status quo’.

‘People who work in that system slowly drown,’ he said. ‘They become removed from themselves, foreigners to themselves.’ Iranian officials ‘hand their head over to someone else’, as a Persian expression has it, ‘and the system continues because of those people.’ ‘Submission to power is complex, it depends on other people submitting to power, and it has deep roots.’

Ficus religiosa, 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’s 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 ‘collapsing within the system it created’.