CANNES – After screening “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” a world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, one has to breathe a sigh of relief that director and screenwriter Mohammad Rasoulof is safely out of Iran. A victim of a politically motivated jail sentence for supporting the 2022 Masha Amini hijab protests, Rasoulof‘s latest feature will likely anger the Iranian government even more. Especially considering how brilliant “Sacred Fig” is at deconstructing the rampant injustice in the totalitarian state.
Set during the aforementioned protests, “Fig” centers on a family of four who each represent a key component of Iranian society. Iman (Misagh Zare) has just earned a promotion as an investigative judge after working for 20 years in the civil service. The first step into eventually becoming a judge in the revolutionary courts. Along with that position comes a gun, illegal in most cases in the country, to protect himself. His wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), is excited over her husband’s promotion knowing it can lead to a larger apartment and a more affluent life in Iranian society. Her daughters, 21-year-old college student Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), a teenager who is obsessed with dying her hair blue and painting her nails, are blissfully unaware of their father’s real career. It soon becomes very apparent Iman and Najmeh’s daughters are ready for the freedom they experience on social media to manifest itself in real life. Sadly, that’s not gonna fly with their father’s new appointment. At least in his house.
When the protests over Masha Amini’s treatment begin, Rezvan and her friend Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi) get stuck in the middle of a crowd at the university. Sadaf is the victim of a buckshot gunshot to the face and afraid she’ll get arrested if taken to a hospital, Rezvan races her back to her family’s apartment for safety. At first furious her daughter would bring a protester into their home, Najmeh starts to wake up to the fact this rebellion might not be spurred on by the existential threat trumpeted by the propaganda on state television.
Up until this moment, Rasoulof has used amateur social media video footage to chronicle the brutality the protesters (and innocent onlookers) experienced in the streets. In so doing, he has no intention of minimizing the cruelty of Iran’s response and wants to shake the desensitization of most viewers after the proliferation of so many videos in the years since. In so doing, he includes a horrifying scene where Najmeh removes the different bullet fragments from Sadaf’s face and then, with the weight of them in her bloody hand, drops them in the sink. It’s an image that’s hard to forget.
Meanwhile, Iman, preoccupied with a backload of cases because of the protests, is dangerously unaware of his daughter’s views of the events. During a much-needed family dinner, Rezvan bravely calls out the regime, shocking her father, a man who has succumbed to its hardcore Islamic ideology. In just a few weeks, the protests have transformed Iman from a man who was disturbed over having to sign a death warrant into a full-flung authoritarian believer. Or perhaps he was the entire time.
Things take an even more dramatic turn when Iman’s gun goes missing. If his superiors find out not only would he lose his coveted position, but he end up publicly shamed with a three-year jail sentence (owning a gun is basically illegal in Iran). What happens next raises the curtain on the contemporary allegory that each of the figures in the family represents. Iman, clearly, is the embodiment of the paranoid, fearful totalitarian regime. Najmeh is the broader populace who, when push comes to shove, know they need to remove the shackles of the state, even if they don’t know how. Rezvan is the generation on the front line. Ready to take a stand, but probably won’t pull it off. And Sadaf? Her generation will no longer “sit down.” They are the radicals, ready to cross the line for freedom.
Despite his recent prosecution, “Fig” demonstrates that Rasoulof still has hope. He still believes (even if his often brilliant narrative may take a wee bit too long to get there). It may not happen tomorrow, but the youth of today may just be creative enough to outsmart the regime in the long run. If the youth have their say, justice will prevail. [A-]
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