The Seed Of The Sacred Fig

As a title, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig sounds like a parody of a Middle Eastern movie Jerry, George and Elaine might have gone to see on Seinfeld. But the actual film couldn’t be more genuine and vital. A well-deserved nominee in this year’s Best International Feature category at the Academy Awards, Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s near three-hour drama was made in secret in late 2023, deemed illegal by the country’s theocratic dictats.

When the finished film was announced and selected for the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the director was sentenced by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court to eight years in jail, flogging and a fine. Rather than serve time, Rasoulof skipped the country after sentencing and fled to a safe house in Germany (which explains why the film is the German entry into the Best International Feature category). And all some filmmakers have to worry about is getting the final cut.

All the travails have been worth it, though. Excellently played across the board, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig is a microcosm of contemporary Iranian life as filtered through a middle-class Tehran family, with a sprinkling of earned genre elements to boot. The title may sound worthy and dull, yet the film is anything but.

The Seed Of The Sacred Fig turns into a full-blown thriller.

Rasoulof centres on Iman (Misagh Zare), a civil servant who is promoted to an investigating judge tasked with interrogating students who protest against the oppressive regime. He is married to supportive wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani, who has been arrested in Iran over her activism) with two teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki) — neither of whom fully knows what their dad does. This new position means changes: a better standard of living, restrictions on the daughters’ lifestyle (no social media, or giving out their address) and a loaded handgun kept in a drawer for protection (paging Anton Chekhov).

For the first 80 minutes or so, it’s a leisurely but compelling domestic drama as Iman grapples with the new job — the speed with which he has to process the demonstrators denies due diligence — and the arrival of Rezvan’s free-spirited, militant friend Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi) opens up fissures in the family. These cracks escalate after Sadaf is shot in the face with buckshot at a rally — Rasoulof lingers on Najmeh removing the metal pellets from the wounds with tweezers— and then goes AWOL. The generation gap between daughters and father widens — with Najmeh caught helplessly in the middle — and becomes freighted with tension. And then the gun goes missing.

At this point, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig turns into a full-blown thriller. There are gripping interrogations, paranoia, Hollywood-style car chases and it all culminates in a shoot-out in a ruin that is bizarrely reminiscent of the Egypt sequences of The Spy Who Loved Me. But, for the most part, Rasoulof keeps it real, parlaying the political in human terms and never forgetting the true-life consequences. Throughout the film, the fiction is punctuated with TikTok footage of horrifying police brutality (often meted out to women), casualties in hospital and literal blood on the streets. The result is a bold, timely state-of-the-nation address that manages to eschew the polemical for the truly gripping.