THE SEED OF THE SACRED  FIG/ dân e-ye anjîr-e ma'âbed

Germany, 2024, 167 minutes, Colour.

Soheila Golestani, Missagh Zareh, Setareh Maleki, Mahsa Rostami, Niousha Akhshi, Reza Akhlaghirad.

Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof.

A drama which gained a great deal of attention in 2024, many awards and nominations, including Cannes, Golden Globe, Oscars, and, the award of the Ecumenical Jury in Cannes.

The action takes place in Tehran, 2022, the Women, Life, Freedom Movement, protests, police brutality, arrests, death sentences, on the occasion of the death in custody of the young Kurdish woman,Mahsa Amini, and her not covering her hair properly. The film has been written and directed by celebrated Iranian director, Mohammad Rasoulof, who served prison time because of official disapproval of his films and themes, who made this film secretly, carried it with him when he escaped from Iran and moved to Germany where postproduction was completed.

This is quite a long film, initially focusing on a government official, an investigator hoping to be a judge and provide a much better lifestyle for his wife and two daughters, but faced with a moral dilemma about death sentences and commands by prosecutors. He is a devout man, completely loyal to Allah and his understanding of Islamic law and to the state.

However, the first part of the film focuses on his wife, also strict, devoted to her husband, apprehensive about any dangers to his career, demanding with her daughters and not revealing details of their father’s life and work. Soheila Golestani’s intense performance is impressive.

Then the protests, the official condemnation of the young protesters, especially women against the wearing of the hijab, the director inserting actual footage from the protests and riots. The drama for the film heightens when one of the daughters gives her college friend some accommodation, despite the mother’s protest, but the student then is violently beaten, buckshot wound to her eye– and the challenge to the mother, a very careful scene with some tenderness as the mother tends to the wounded young woman.

One of the key issues of the film is the official handing of a gun to the father, and then its disappearing, a threat to his career when the authorities will think he is lax and careless, his making demands on his family, even taking them to a ‘therapy session’ with a skilled interrogator.

As his situation worsens, he takes the family to his old birthplace, his becoming more and more paranoid, including an effective episode where two protesters film and pursue the family. There is a highly melodramatic ending, the issue of the gun, his treatment of his wife and daughters, and their response to him, with the gun and the father’s collapse as well as that of the disillusionment of his wife.

Iran is always in the headlines, its political connections, considered part of the “axis of evil”, its official religious stands as the Islamic Republic of Iran, connections with terrorism in the Middle East, stories of harsh and unjust imprisonment, the morality police and their interventions. Which indicates that this should be a must see film.

There is a verbal prologue to the film which serves as a metaphor for Iran and for the action of the film:  

"Ficus Religiosa is a tree with an unusual life cycle. It seeds, contained in bird droppings, fall on other trees. Aerial roots spring up and grow down to the floor. Then, the branches wrap around the host tree and strangle it. Finally, the sacred fig stands on its own."