The story behind the filming of “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” — which screened at the IU Cinema last Saturday — is fairly well known at this point: it was shot in secret, right under the nose of the Iranian regime, and its director, Mohammad Rasoulof, fled the country after having received an eight-year prison sentence for its distribution. That’s no surprise, really, because the film is deeply critical of the state. In a way, it’s a dramatization of the 2022-23 protests in Iran over the death of activist Mahsa Amini in police custody and, more generally, the country’s strict Hijab and Chastity Law.
The film even goes so far as to incorporate real-life footage of the protests, demonstrating the violent extent the state went to quell them. But the intermittent montages of police brutality are hardly the most powerful parts of the movie: “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is, at the end of the day, a family drama, making it an intense treatise on the way politics is deeply intertwined with every aspect of life, no matter how mundane.
Iman (Missagh Zareh) is an investigating judge in the Islamic Revolutionary Court; he’s responsible for signing off on the sentences of those who’ve been arrested in the streets for protesting. His wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), is desperately trying to protect her family’s safety, even as her daughters, Rezvan and Sana (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki, respectively), begin to sympathize with the protesters — a fact that causes a fiery strife between parents and children.
I won’t go much more into the plot than that. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is 168 minutes long, and a lot happens in that time. The “main” conflict — I put “main” in quotation marks because this is a film of many conflicts, all equally important — doesn’t kick off until well into the second act. This is the sort of film one would benefit from knowing as little as possible about before going into it. What I will say is that, for all intents and purposes, it might as well be a horror film. There are moments here that are legitimately terrifying, precisely because of how rooted in reality they are.
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is a representation of how the state uses both ideological and physically repressive means to maintain its political and, in this case, religious legitimacy. In the film, characters often cite religion to defend repressive laws — “The world has changed, but God has not; nor his laws,” Iman states at one point.
The characters also cite the television and its state-sponsored news programs, and it seems that’s all the reasoning they need: they genuinely don’t believe, or genuinely can’t believe, their government would lie to them for the sake of its own power.
It should go without saying that this is hardly exclusive to the Islamic Republic of Iran, nor is it at all exclusive to the Middle East. The events depicted in “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” are but one example of state violence that occurs throughout the world.
And it’s this that makes the choice to zoom into a specific family living in the midst of that violence that much more fascinating. Really, what the film depicts is micropolitics, a look at how the family unit can itself act as an ideological arm of the state under the right circumstances. It’s here where the film’s long runtime is a benefit — it takes its time, it establishes its characters and slowly builds itself to a climax that, because of its patience, works all the better. In other words, the family begins to fracture at exactly the right pace, neither too quick nor too slow.
Partly because of this commitment to a measured pacing, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is an extremely tense film. Being in a protest that’s suddenly infiltrated and broken up by the police is a uniquely visceral and scary experience, and the film captures that feeling perfectly. I’m almost certain I was holding my breath and gripping my armrest for several minutes at certain points. I’m also certain I wasn’t the only one in the fairly packed theater who felt that way: there were varying moments when people in the audience covered their eyes, murmured to the ones next to them, gasped and otherwise audibly and physically expressed their terror and surprise.
All that being said, this isn’t the easiest film to see right now. It’s yet to receive a wide release in the U.S.; the IU Cinema just finished its two-day run of the picture and there’s no other local arthouses showing it. But it’s set for a video-on-demand release Feb. 18 — not as ideal as a theater experience, but certainly something to keep on your radar regardless.
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” was nominated for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards this year, and it was named Best International Film of 2024 by the National Board of Review. But I think it’s entirely fair to say that it’s one of the best films of the past year in general. It’s a powerful work of protest, a reminder of the ability for film and other forms of art to illustrate the subjective and objective realities of political turmoil. And it deserves to be seen by as many people as possible.
