Saleem Vaillancourt

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.

‘I always like to say that Iranian cinema emerges out of a thousand years of poetry, and Canadian cinema emerges out of fifty years of discount furniture commercials,’ Matthew Rankin said at a recent screening of his movie Universal Language. I come from both countries, but it’s the furniture gag that struck home.

Forty years ago the Islamic Republic of Iran admitted that it had executed my great-uncle. He was 65 years old. Mehdi Amin-Amin was survived by his wife, daughter, two grandsons and three siblings, including my grandmother. If I’d known him, I would have called him Mehdai-joon, a contraction of Mehdi and the Persian words dai (‘maternal uncle’) and joon (‘dear’). He was arrested and killed because he was a Baha’i: a member of Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious minority. More than two hundred were executed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Today Baha’is suffer discrimination in every part of their lives.