The Seed of the Sacred Fig review

Social realist film-making in Iran takes an interminable amount of courage and bravery. Directors like Jafar Panahi (This is Not a Film, Taxi) and Saeed Roustayi (Leila’s Brothers) have sacrificed their freedom and served jail time in their pursuit of truthful, humanitarian storytelling in the face of a government who have not been particularly subtle regarding their stance on artistic licence. Mohammad Rasoulof is another such pioneer. His latest movie, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, is an engaging and powerful drama made under typically strenuous conditions. It was shot in two and a half months over a period of two/three day intervals and disrupted first by the threat of a renewed prison sentence for Rasoulof (he had recently served a year’s sentence for “propaganda against the regime”) and later by the director’s forced fleeing of his home country, smuggling himself and his film into Germany, where post-production was completed.

The title is alluded to at the very beginning, referring to a breed of fig tree whose seeds grow to form roots that wrap themselves around its host. It’s an appropriate metaphor for the suffocating nature of Iran’s theocratic regime, and how this poisonously permeates through families and their homes. Devout patriarch Iman has just been promoted to the role of an investigator in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court. It is a position that promises greater prosperity for his family: wife Najmeh and their two daughters Rezvan and Sana. However, it also presents new challenges. Najmeh cautions the girls that they will be forced to essentially redefine themselves in the face of additional scrutiny that comes with their father’s new position: in terms of their clothes, their social media presence and their entourage.

This latter point becomes fatefully pertinent, as the family’s changing circumstances coincides with a wave of demonstrations against the authoritarian government’s treatment of young women, stemming from the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. Rezvan’s friend Sadaf gets caught up in a college protest and is gruesomely shot in the face, and suddenly Najmeh finds herself treating and housing someone who will inevitably be painted as a dissenter of the regime. Desperate to maintain the sense of increased conformity, she ruthlessly casts Sadaf out, to the dismay of her girls. Here, we see the beginning of a divide that will test the family’s foundations to its limit.

The film cleverly intersperses actual social media footage from the 2022-23 protests within the drama, and this becomes the source that Rezvan and Sana rely upon to discover what the state news may be reluctant to reveal. The girls, particularly Rezvan, become wise to the regime’s ploys and outspoken towards their parents in favour of those being oppressed – this culminates in a heated exchange at the dinner table between Rezvan and Iman. He, as she correctly points out, is on the inside; responsible for the daily sentencing of thousands of political protestors. After this exchange, Najmeh berates Rezvan for spoiling a rare chance at a family meal. However, what she perceives as impudence and disrespect towards Iman becomes something far greater in his eyes – the seeds of distrust have been firmly planted.

It is a remarkably tense film, examining how the tendrils of despair and paranoia can slowly erode the stability of a conventional upper-middle-class Iranian family. There is a major plot point involving a personal possession of Iman’s that I do not want to disclose – it acts as a symbol of his professional authority – and it leads to a climate of interrogation descending upon his household. All three women are subjected to inquisitions, both internal and external, masked as “psychological tests”, and the duplicitousness with which Iman seamlessly consolidates his professional life into his personal one is disconcerting. Notwithstanding his position as a husband and a father, he is first and foremost a man of the regime, and Rasoulof credibly makes us believe that he will go to extreme lengths to correct the rebellion and disobedience he feels that he has been subjected to.

The performances are terrific across the board – special mention should go to Soheila Golestani as Najmeh. Having been delegated the responsibility of managing the family due to Iman’s intense workload, she becomes terrified at the idea of its structure unravelling and Golestani is a constant picture of anxiety and desperation in her attempts to protect her family. Her own political sensibilities appear more blurred that she is letting on – she maintains a strong solidarity towards Iman in front of her daughters, but privately voices doubts to him about whether young girls, like Sadaf, are being treated justly.

There is quite an annoying plot hole that the movie tries to slip past you in the last 45 minutes, and, at 2hrs and 46 minutes, the film can feel overly meditative at times. Yet, considering the trials that Rasoulof undertook to capture every second of footage, it doesn’t seem right to advocate for any scene to be cut. It is a deeply courageous and engrossing story of paranoia, suspicion and a family at breaking point.