The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof (2024)

Review by Zebib K. Abraham

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a riveting tale of one family’s unraveling within the modern-day Iranian regime. Iman (Missagh Zareh) works as an ‘investigating judge’, who seeks out and prosecutes those guilty of crimes against the regime and God. Though conflicted, he is ultimately loyal to the cause. A promotion that coincides with the political protests sweeping the country brings increasing pressures; he is expected to quickly sentence hundreds of young people to imprisonment or death. Najmeh, his wife (Soheila Golestani), serves and encourages him at every turn. His daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sara (Setareh Malek) become engrossed in social media footage of the protests; the characters and the viewers witness the real-life footage of beatings and police violence. When their friend Sadaf (Niousha Akshi) is severely injured in the protests, the daughters are thrust further into political awareness. 

Rostami and Malek give authentic performances shifting from innocence to righteous anger, from wide-eyed shock to furtive resistance. Najmeh responds to her daughters’ anger by victim-blaming and denying the reality of government abuses. Golestani’s performance is both contained and conflicted at once. Beneath her reassurances, justifications, and anger, the actor (and activist) conveys her character’s coiled anxiety. As the daughters question the regime, their father retreats further into narrow-minded thinking, which leads to the pivotal crisis in the film when Iman’s gun, given to him for work, goes missing, and he begins to suspect that someone in his family has stolen it. The intimate, tense family drama explodes into a paranoid psychological thriller. 

The film works on many levels. It is an incisive and timely polemic on authoritarian governments, and how oppressive regimes undermine truth, reality and human decency. 

The making of the film was a logistical miracle. Shot in secret over two and a half months, the footage was then smuggled out in batches to remote editor Andrew Bird, who had to edit the film on his own, without knowing Farsi, and with a translated screenplay. Bird intuited the length and rhythm of the shots in emotional and confrontational scenes, as well as selecting which moments of real-life protest footage to include. Despite this, the film has a cohesive flow and an inevitable momentum. The first half of the film does, perhaps, progress too slowly, with a turning point coming quite late in the story, but the gradual progression of the familial conflicts give the final act much more emotional weight. 

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an act of protest as well as a depiction of political oppression. After the release of the film, the director Mohammad Rasoulof escaped imprisonment and flogging by leaving the country on foot; Golestani is still trapped in Iran, while Rostami, Maleki, and Akshi, also escaped the country. The film required immense sacrifice to make. The lengths the cast and crew went to are inspiring. 

The film manages to inform through empathy, as the best political art can do, through intimate settings and realistic dialogue, familiar themes of adolescence and rebellion, and emotional close-ups. We can imagine these conversations with our own parents or children. Debates between children and their parents capture the psychological rabbit hole that followers of the autocratic regime fall into; truth is malleable, or even dangerous, and those who think differently are the enemy. Najmeh argues that protestors must have ‘done something wrong to get arrested’, and ‘it’s the enemy trying to undermine us’, yet later defends her daughters’ viewpoints. Iman shifts from ambivalent questioning into black and white regime-speak. The Seed of the Sacred Fig offers a startling insight into how decent people can become corrupted, and how insecurity and fear can turn to violence. In our current age of blooming, totalitarian rule, with warped, cultish thinking taking over sections of Western populace, this insight is more necessary than ever.

Explore Zebib K. Abraham‘s My Hit List