The Seed of the Secret Fig, directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, is out now.
Rating out of five: ★★★★½
This Iranian Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film would have been just as deserving as the actual winner, Brazil’s wonderful I’m Still Here. Both are excoriating portraits of human rights abuses heaped upon ordinary civilians, and both leave their audiences silent and sobered.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig concerns a Tehrani family with teen daughters, whose law-abiding father Iman is promoted to investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court. The upwardly hopeful middle-class family gather for Dad to warn his girls that their behaviour must now be beyond reproach and they should stay completely off social media.
But as demonstrations protesting the authoritarian government break out across the city, the young people’s activist sympathies clash with the dogmatic values their father is forced to uphold.
This political drama has no soundtrack and relies on strong, natural performances and a compelling narrative to engage for its nearly three-hour run. Some scenes are a tough watch, and the ramifications of opposing an armed police force are graphically portrayed in one particularly gruesome scene.
Like Asghar Farhadi’s films, Sacred Fig also provides a fascinating glimpse into another, less-permissive culture.
The girls spend afternoons plucking eyebrows and applying nail polish that their mother insists they remove before their father gets home. To communicate out of parental earshot, the sisters text each other from opposite ends of the sofa, as their video feeds spew the violent truth of what is happening in the streets. (These moments show real-life footage of Tehran’s 2022-23 protests over the unlawful death of young Mahsa Amini.)
But while Mother toes the party line – “Setting fires and breaking glass is living one’s life?” she retorts when her girls defend the civil unrest – even Iman privately questions the corruption endemic in his longed-for role.
Award-winning independent film-maker Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment and flogging when Sacred Fig was nominated for Cannes’ Palme d’Or. He escaped to Europe where he now lives in exile. No stranger to state control, he had shot the film in secret over 70 days.
His film is long, but it’s grippingly compulsive as tensions are ratcheted up to an almost suffocating degree.
It’s another grim reminder of how dangerous overly moralistic political systems can be.
