Acts of Refusal
By A.G. Sims
New York Film Festival 2024:
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Dir. Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran, NEON
People are defined by their rituals. Even the small ones, like driving, can be a revelation on-screen, a routine moment of solitude that gives the audience room to contemplate a character’s inner life. Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s characters are so defined by such rituals that, in the first act of The Seed of the Sacred Fig, when a man named Iman (Missagh Zareh) drives home from work, I instinctively felt a pang of dread. If Iman was anything like the men behind the wheel in Rasoulof’s award winning There Is No Evil, the ordinary nature of his commute would slowly unravel, revealing something dark beneath the surface. When we discover that Iman’s been promoted to investigator on the Revolutionary Court, it’s no surprise that the mood is more foreboding than celebratory. Confirmation of that intuition arrives hastily with the flash of a gun. The gun going off might be a narrative inevitability here, but in Rasoulof’s latest, the bullets in the chamber are less important than its symbolic meaning—a lightly veiled metaphor for the constantly lurking threat of patriarchal violence. However, when the gun goes missing, a straightforward parable flowers into something revolutionary.
The film opens with bullets thudding onto a table. Iman’s been issued a service weapon because his new role puts him at odds with the public during a period of unrest, as a crush of protests break across the country over women’s rights. It’s a noticeably strange welcome for what seems like a mid-level paper-pushing office job, and on Iman’s drive home, we sense his conflicting emotions, as the menacing firearm glares from the passenger seat. Still, his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) welcomes the news. They’ll finally be able to move into a bigger house, she notes, and their daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), won’t have to share a room anymore. But Iman’s ethics are immediately challenged on his first day as investigator. He’s asked to sign off on an indictment, before even having a chance to read it, which carries the death penalty for the defendant—a document that his predecessor was fired for refusing to sign. Troubled by the request, Iman tells his wife that night, “They think they can make me do anything.” But under the theocracy, any order from the prosecutor is God’s will, and so he signs.
Authoritarian governments tend to have a silencing effect on the population, fear and paranoia forcing people inward. Grappling with the moral dilemma of his soul-sucking job, Iman fades into the background, leaving Najmeh to do the work of keeping their young daughters Rezvan and Sana safe, which means keeping them in line. They’re supportive of the protests happening around the country and deeply invested in the online discourse and video streams, which worries Najmeh, who looks uneasy as she watches the news every night. The likelihood that one of her daughters will end up getting hurt increases when Sana’s high school is closed because the girls are demonstrating. Rezvan hovers even closer to the fray. Her friend from university, Sadaf, has been participating in the protests, and Rezvan refuses her mom’s pleas to distance herself.
Generational differences play out between Najmeh and her daughters, building up to a dramatic sequence that brings Najmeh face to face with the brutality of the state. Rezvan and Sana sneak Sadaf into their home one day, after she’s been injured with buckshot by the police, even though she wasn’t demonstrating. Najmeh solemnly removes the pellets from Sadaf’s disfigured face. If Najmeh’s stoicism makes her seem a bit scarily unshaken in her resolve, Rasoulof asks us to reconsider her interiority when Najmeh drops the pellets into the bathroom sink, blood splattering as they pinball around the basin in slow motion. The debate finally arrives at the family dinner table, in a fiery confrontation between eldest daughter Rezvan and her father, laying their perspectives bare. He accuses her of being brainwashed by propaganda. “Don’t you think I know better after 20 years of working for the regime?” he asks. “No, you don’t,” she counters. “You’re on the inside, so you want to preserve it.”
After just two weeks on the job, Iman wakes one morning and can’t find his gun. Shifting gears from a slow burning family drama into a suspense thriller, Iman turns on his family, subjecting them all to painful interrogations. After the family’s address is leaked online, Iman’s paranoia mounts, and they leave Tehran for his birthplace, a remote village where they can become the family “they once were.” He confiscates their phones and takes them hostage, forcing a kind of “digital cleanse” designed not to heal but rather to cut them off from contemporary life. Faith is not to be questioned, and the ancient is eternally at odds with modernity, in Iman’s worldview, but the fast-paced machinations of the third act suggest an alternative. In the final sequence, the women of the family escape Iman, running through the ruins of a stepped village, an architectural marvel representing thousands of years of Iranian history. The youngest daughter Sana gets the final word, reminding us that though our lives are inevitably shaped by our histories, our ideas need not remain frozen in time.
The protests in The Seed of the Sacred Fig are based on the real-life women-led uprisings that ignited Iran two years ago. The movement began after 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini died from injuries sustained while in police custody after being unjustly arrested for how she was wearing her hijab. Protests erupted across the country, and the government responded with brutal violence, arbitrarily arresting more than 19,000 protestors, torturing and assaulting detainees, and killing more than 500 people, many of them young and at least 69 of them children.
Rasoulof, 51, is part of a rich legacy of courageous Iranian filmmakers who have bravely challenged the Islamic Republic’s authority and inevitability, through resistance films that have often left them exiled from the homeland and people their art is fighting for. The production of this film was difficult, shot over the course of three months in secret, and further complicated by an eight-year prison sentence Rasoulof received midway into production. He fled arrest, crossing the border through the mountains on foot and had to leave his equipment behind. The footage was later smuggled to Hamburg, where it was edited by Andrew Bird, who added in real-life smartphone videos of the demonstrations. Aesthetically, Rasoulof’s visual style is infused with some of the formal poetry of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, but this is not the subtle politics and metaphoric resistance of the New Wave. The choice to include real videos that circulated the internet during the 2022 uprisings makes this film feel almost surreal in its directness.
In some ways, The Seed of the Sacred Fig made me think of Bahman Farmanara’s Tall Shadows of the Wind, the 1979 horror classic wherein a remote community invent a god in their own image and end up crushed by it. In the film, the villagers build a scarecrow to shield their crops, but when someone draws a face on it, it takes on a supernatural element and bodies start piling up. Gripped by fear and paranoia, the villagers bend to its will, until the arbitrary and unpredictable nature of the violence becomes too much to bear, causing them to unite and revolt. To avoid government censors, the revolution in that film was shot abstractly—all of the villagers dressed in red robes storm a field setting fire to the black scarecrows that had terrorized them, a visual sea of blood washing over the green landscape, the trio of colors together evoking the Iranian flag. Now, Rasoulof has done something just as daring, in the context of his own time, smuggling real images of Iranian people fighting back against their government inside a genre thriller, and risking his life to get it on screens.
Political cinema tends to place a heavy burden on the shoulders of the viewer. It would be a disservice to the sacrifices of Rasoulof and his cast and crew to watch his depiction of a country intolerant to dissent, cracking down on protestors and turning the cops on students, and come away with the conclusion that this kind of state sanctioned violence is unique to Iran, or limited to totalitarian regimes at the fringe of the liberal world order. It’s actually this kind of narrow thinking that tucks in the Western world at night, numbing us to the creeping fascism of our own governments. Despite their sharp social critiques, Rasoulof’s films don’t seem directed at Iran’s oppressive leaders, so much as the ordinary people that carry out their orders, reminding us, as a Rasoulof character once put it, that our power is in our refusal. We can always say no.