Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is one of cinema’s strongest authorities on his home country’s repressive theocratic regime. It seems that every time the Iranian government seeks to suppress Rasoulof or one of his compatriot contemporaries, these filmmakers only come back stronger and more determined. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is Rasoulof’s tenth film, shot in secret and smuggled out of Iran to Hamburg, Germany. Fig is both a Shakespearean tragedy and a vital piece of searingly potent political activism.
The film’s title refers to a species of fig which spreads by wrapping itself around other trees, a plant which became a symbol for Iran’s theocracy. This type of parasitical propagation essentially plays out within the family unit Fig follows. When we meet him, Iman (Missagh Zareh) seems to be a mostly moderate lawyer, at least by the standards of his society. When he is appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, he meets the stress of the job with the kind of blind patriarchal “patriotism” he hadn’t seemed to have fully adopted previously. In this court, he is expected to approve judgments from higher-ups without assessing any evidence. His promotion coincides with a wave of protest, which leads him to be overworked, dealing with case after case of arrested demonstrators. He initially frets over a potential death sentence, but clearly ascribes less and less humanity to these cases as time goes on.
These protests eventually touch Iman’s family directly when his daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki) take in their friend Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), who has been shot in the face during a protest. Iman’s wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) helps clean and bandage Sadaf and makes sure she’s relatively safe, but does not offer to keep her in their home, despite the pleas of her daughters. She knows what rage could boil over in her husband. Such rage does boil over when he seems to have misplaced the gun he was given by the Court for protection. His suspicion and mistrust unravel the entire family structure until it quite literally feels like one of his interrogations.
All four of the main cast are excellent, and Golestani and Zareh are unforgettable as two sides of a culturally conservative coin. Najmeh isn’t particularly fond of the protest movement, but she also isn’t thrilled about the effects of Iman’s rage and growing paranoia. Iman initially tries to reason with his daughters (though much of his reasoning is flawed, of course), believing one or both of them to be responsible for hiding his gun. He does have one correct point: the gun was to be used for their protection, and later in the film, their address is made public, leading to obvious new fears and tensions. As a matter of fact, from his point of view, it was a privilege for him to have told the girls about his new job, as he and his family are supposed to remain completely anonymous for their safety. Both husband and wife have clearly-defined points of view, and that helps the film feel grounded, even as it transitions into a pure thriller with Iman as the villain.
For as much as I was kept on the edge of my seat with Fig’s ideas, performances, and tense conflicts, I do feel that its near three-hour runtime is a little indulgent given the basic trajectory of the story. I wouldn’t dare suggest that anything in the film is not well-executed, nor that I know better than Rasoulof what needs to be there and what doesn’t. It simply drags slightly in certain areas. However, when you’re dealing with a topic of this magnitude, a topic audiences from all over the world should reckon with and understand, I can certainly understand putting as much of your heart into a film as possible, and Rasoulof has done just that. Here’s to many more films from Rasoulof and his Iranian counterparts. Movies which speak truth to power are needed not just now, but always. | George Napper
In Persian with subtitlesThe Seed of the Sacred Fig was featured in the 2024 St. Louis International Film Festival (SLIFF). Further information about the Festival, which runs Nov. 7-17, is available from the festival website
