In the early months of 2024, a few weeks into the shooting of his new film, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” Mohammad Rasoulof learned that his lawyers received a letter. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court had processed his case, composed of several charges against his previous movies and activism, and sentenced him to eight years in prison. Rasoulof asked his lawyers how much time he had before the authorities took him in. The process of filing an appeal, they told him, could take up to two months. He still had some time.
Rasoulof and his team worked around the clock on shooting and postproduction. Another call came in. The court had rejected the appeal, and his eight-year sentence was to start immediately. To make an example of him, his lawyers warned, government agents would probably storm his house in the middle of the night, handcuff him and take him to jail.
Rasoulof had to make the most difficult decision of his life. He was always determined to live and work in Iran, which had been a wellspring of inspiration throughout his filmmaking career. He had already been arrested in 2010 for shooting a movie about the Green Movement, a period of mass unrest in the wake of the 2009 presidential election, which he never finished. He was sent to jail for seven months in 2022 after signing a petition that was critical of the government. So he didn’t fear being in prison, and he felt no urge to flee from regime interrogators and torturers. If anything, those encounters had provided fodder for his work. Yet this time was different. Already confronted with the likelihood that he would have to serve at least five years of his eight-year sentence, Rasoulof expected that the court would probably open a new case once it learned about “Sacred Fig,” which he was shooting in secret, without the appropriate approvals. Serving five years, plus whatever the latest charges would yield, would surely end his career. So Rasoulof decided to leave Iran.
He had learned, from another inmate during one of his prison stints, about a network of people who specialized in helping persecuted citizens escape Iran. When Rasoulof contacted them, they advised him to leave everything behind, including his electronic devices and IDs, throw some clothes in a backpack and meet them in a town near Tehran.
Rasoulof was taken to a hiding place and, from there, driven on a side road to another city. After a few days of traveling along abandoned roads, he reached a small village on the border. He stayed in a small room for a few days, preparing for the final leg of his journey, which involved a hike over the mountains into a neighboring country. The villagers, who had met many people in his circumstances, suspected he was important because the network regularly checked in about his well-being. For the villagers, harboring such an escapee entailed more risk, which meant more pay. When it was time for Rasoulof to depart, they refused to release him.
Astonished by this turn of events, members of the network negotiated a deal with the villagers. At midnight, he was delivered to a spot in the middle of nowhere. It was so dark he couldn’t see anything. Money changed hands, and he was returned to the people he hired to smuggle him out of the country. They then took him to another border village, from which the passage to the neighboring country was longer and more treacherous.
Here two new guides joined Rasoulof, who at 52 is not an adept mountaineer. They pulled up steep mountainsides through patches of snow, facing brutal wind and relentless sun. When he faltered, his guides strapped his arms around their shoulders and carried him. They encouraged him and gave him their share of food and drink, even their shoes. They kept pointing up to a snow-capped peak, telling him that the hard part would be over once they got there.
When they reached the top, instead of the smooth, downhill slope he anticipated, he found himself facing a perilously steep decline. Thoroughly exhausted, his muscles stiff, his joints aching, he told his guides that he would fall if they tried to descend. They let him rest a while and gave him their remaining food and water, then took his hands and slowly made their way down.
They arrived at the pickup point two hours late, where a man on a motorbike was waiting. Rasoulof climbed on the back, and the man sped off over the hills and down dirt paths. At the next stop, Rasoulof spent two days in a room attached to a corner store in a small town. Then a car picked him up and ferried him to a bigger city. For the first time since he left his apartment in Tehran, he had internet access. He sent messages to his friends and family to tell them he had arrived, then to his editor, who was in Germany, to catch up on the postproduction of “Sacred Fig.”
He presented himself to the German Embassy, and after submitting biometrics, he obtained permission to travel to Germany. He reached Hamburg on May 10, 2024, 28 days after he left Tehran. He went straight to the studio where postproduction was underway.
They had six days to prepare the movie for its first showing in Cannes. On May 24, the film’s screening in the festival was met with a 13-minute standing ovation.
Five months after he left Iran, Rasoulof walked into the lobby of a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. He was slightly hunched and took small steps, his eyes sunken. On Sept. 30, the night before our meeting, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which ended up winning a special jury award at Cannes, premiered at the New York Film Festival to a packed audience at Lincoln Center. The screening was followed by a Q&A that lasted until midnight. In a few hours, he was scheduled to fly to South Korea to serve as president of the jury at the Busan International Film Festival.
As he approached the table, he scanned his surroundings and then extended that curiosity to me after sitting down. I told him how long I have lived outside Iran and where in Iran I grew up. We were both southerners, it turned out. He is from Shiraz, and I am from Ahvaz, and we did what Iranian southerners tend to do upon meeting: exchanged childhood stories and offered up family histories, exploring potential connections. Minutes into meeting him, I noticed a pattern, which persisted through our interview. When discussing his work and life outside Iran, he was somber, more contained. When the conversation turned to life in Iran, a switch flipped and he grew animated, his face expressive and his hands gesticulating wildly.
Rasoulof is among Iran’s most famous and revered filmmakers, his work notable for featuring characters who are government officials, an inherently risky endeavor. With every new movie, these characters became more fully realized and more compelling, leading up to his portrayal of Iman, one of the protagonists in “Sacred Fig.”
The film is a fictional family drama that takes place during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, a period of mass protests that began in 2022 after a 22-year-old woman, Zhina Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for not properly wearing her hijab, was beaten and killed in police custody. The patriarch of the family in “Sacred Fig,” Iman (Misagh Zare), aspires to become a judge but has recently been promoted to an investigator for prosecutors, and his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), supports her husband through this transition in his life.
But as the movement breaks out on the streets of Iran, tensions arise between the parents and their more progressive daughters. During a particularly fraught moment, Iman loses his gun, which could result in his being fired and even imprisoned. Convinced that someone in the family has stolen it, he first questions his daughters, going so far as to have them interrogated by a colleague. When the investigation leads nowhere, Iman grows suspicious of his wife, too. The tenor of the film changes from social realism to horror, and the plot culminates in the Chekhovian firing of the pistol.
Like “Sacred Fig,” many of Rasoulof’s films feature interrogators, torturers and security officials, examining their worldviews and struggles. “Before prison, those characters were abstract, imaginary,” he told me. “When I met them and spent time with them in there, I got to know who they were and how to tell their stories.” In 2020, he made “There Is No Evil,” which consisted of four poignant stories on capital punishment. It featured characters ranging from top executioners to the conscripts forced to participate in executions and their families. “A Man of Integrity,” released in 2017, centered on a young family from Tehran living in a small town by the Caspian Sea. The father, who runs a fish farm, gets into conflict with the local authorities over rampant corruption around the distribution of water and pays a heavy price. In 2013, “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” offered an unflinching look at state-sponsored violence, inspired by the murders of writers and intellectuals in the 1990s. And “Goodbye,” from 2011, was about a pregnant woman whose license to practice law is revoked. She wants to leave Iran, but she needs permission from her husband to travel out of the country.
“Sacred Fig” offers perhaps the most provocative exploration of these themes, particularly the myriad injustices Iranian women have to endure in their daily lives. “In my early movies, women were far from the center,” Rasoulof says. “At one point I looked back and noticed that I had not created a single round, compelling female character. I knew very little about women’s lives, and I decided to rectify that.”
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was also a war against cinema. In his book “Kashf al-Asrar,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini advised people to study Islam instead of wasting their time “in cinemas, theaters, dances and mixed swimming pools, all activities that have deflowered our youth and stifled in them the spirit of piety and bravery.” Of the 524 movie theaters in Iran, more than 100 were burned down during that time. Shortly after the revolution, a censorship office was established in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. All film scripts were to be submitted to this office for licensing, and the government was determined to censor anything it deemed noncompliant. In 1985, of the 540 submitted scripts, 492 were rejected. The following year, 235 of 260 scripts were rejected. The films that came out of that era rarely featured women in any meaningful way; they were instead depicted as stooped bodies covered in loose smocks and chadors, which reveal only their eyes, mouths and hands.
In the early 1990s, after the Iran-Iraq war ended and Ayatollah Khomeini died, a small but significant shift occurred within Iranian cinema. More filmmakers turned to documentary filmmaking. Iran had gone through a revolution and an eight-year war, two historical events that, because of state censorship, were not represented in the arts. There was endless footage from those events, many participants and eyewitnesses, innumerable stories. Merely splicing some of this footage together or putting real people in front of the camera led to the creation of memorable documentaries showcasing the day-to-day lives of average Iranians, which in the fiercely ideological times of the 1980s were mostly sidelined.
Another strand was a postrevolution emergence of art-house cinema. Many filmmakers began creating low-budget movies with small casts, conspicuously devoid of stars and special effects. The films tended to be set mostly outdoors, with characters appearing in long shots against the natural landscape of Iran. The plots were simple, whether depicting a girl determined to buy a goldfish (“The White Balloon”) or a boy who accidentally loses his sister’s shoes (“Children of Heaven”). These movies aimed for subtlety and metaphor and judiciously avoided engaging in politics or sending direct messages of any sort, leaving the viewer to intuit whatever criticisms might be embedded within.
Art-house Iranian cinema enjoyed remarkable success overseas, not just in film festivals but in academia and elite circles. Directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Majid Majidi and Jafar Panahi received accolades internationally. Inside Iran, their films earned the pejorative title Greenhouse Cinema, for their perceived lack of connection with the sociopolitical struggles of Iranians and their dependence on foreign funding.
Rasoulof appeared on the scene in the 1990s, as these two genres were thriving. His first film, “The Twilight,” from 2002, was a docudrama about the marriage of two inmates in a prison in a poor northeastern town. Six years later, he released the documentary “Head Wind,” about the ubiquity of satellite dishes and other media Iranians use to access censored material. He also directed two features, which followed the conventions of the art-house cinema: “Iron Island” (2005), set on an oil tanker abandoned in the Persian Gulf, and “The White Meadows” (2009), a magical realist film about a man who travels across a body of water and stops at small islands to collect people’s tears.
June 2009 marked the beginning of the Green Movement protests, the biggest and most vital nationwide uprising in decades. Moved by the demonstrations in the street, Rasoulof wrote a script that bears a resemblance to “Sacred Fig.” In it, a family of four unravels as the mother, a news anchor for state TV, and the father, an oligarch whose company is under contract with the intelligence services, grapple with the rebellion of their college-age children, who have been following the uprisings on social media. Panahi, Rasoulof’s fellow filmmaker and friend, read the script and agreed to join the production as co-director. On the final day of shooting, the set was raided. Their equipment was confiscated, and the two directors and their crew were arrested and taken to jail. Rasoulof was arraigned and sentenced to six years in prison for conspiracy against national security. After his appeal, he instead received a one-year sentence for creating propaganda against the government. “Up to that point, I had been dealing with the censors, the people the government had put in charge of strangling cinema,” he told me. “After that, I had to deal with the government itself.”
In 2010, as he was sitting in solitary confinement in Evin Prison reflecting on his past, Rasoulof had a realization: Allegory, which the art-house Iranian cinema had come to rely upon, felt distasteful and full of cowardice, a form of complicity. In his early movies, for example, he subtly wove the political message into the story, creating characters like the dictatorial captain Nemat in “Iron Island,” who could be read as a metaphor for Iran’s supreme leader, but only if the viewer chose to interpret him that way.
Rasoulof emerged from prison a different man and a different filmmaker. “That whole metaphor-and-allegory stuff is the aesthetics of totalitarianism,” Rasoulof says. “It has been a subtle form of suppression, of dissuading artists from expressing themselves, their true intentions. This aesthetics has led to the political castration of cinema. I am done with that path. I want to create realistic images, to express myself in my art.” Before his imprisonment, the system was his protagonist. The structure within which his characters lived stripped them of their freedom and determined their fate. They struggled to break out of those confines and eventually fell victim to them. In his most recent films, Rasoulof decided to “tell the stories of those who say no” and succeed in their defiance.
He articulates that shift in the context of infanticide in classical Persian literature: If Oedipus, who inadvertently killed his own father, is a foundational myth in Western culture, Iranians had the Shahnameh’s Rostam, who inadvertently killed his own son. “In my movies, you often see teenagers rebel against the elders,” he says. “Our history has been one of infanticide. I want to turn it upside down.”
When Rasoulof was released from prison in February 2023, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement had started losing intensity after a series of severe crackdowns, but the police presence in Tehran remained overwhelming. Guards stood around main squares, their uniforms ranging from the light green of the national police to the black of the anti-riot special forces, with plainclothes militia scattered among them. Police cars patrolled, occasionally accompanied by armored trucks. Street surveillance seemed near total.
In this environment, Rasoulof started working on “Sacred Fig.” To avoid attracting attention, he was not directly involved in the hiring of his cast and crew, instead communicating through two other people. They held long meetings to discuss each position, hoping to ensure that everyone they approached was trustworthy. His liaisons then set out to recruit people without initially disclosing that Rasoulof was behind the film. Slowly, they built their team.
Contrary to their expectations, the actors were the easiest to hire. Iran had changed, and actors had changed more than most. After Rasoulof was released from prison, it felt as if actors were speaking a different language. Many told him that they no longer wanted to work in the old system. About a dozen prominent actresses were arrested and taken to jail for appearing before the camera without hijab or for expressing solidarity with the protesters on the street. Golestani, who plays the mother in “Sacred Fig,” was arrested in November 2022, two months into the uprisings, for recording a short video in which she, along with young actors of her theater group, appear unveiled. She was sent to jail for 12 days.
Rasoulof acknowledges that the movie owes a great deal to the courage of the actors, especially women. They were aware that by participating, they could open themselves up to bans and prosecution. But they insisted on going ahead anyway. “That phase of my career was dead to me,” Golestani told me, referring to her earlier work, “and this movie was going to be my will.”
Knowing that he was being surveilled, Rasoulof rarely showed up on set. But shooting outdoor scenes proved less challenging than anticipated. Rasoulof was making a movie about a religious family, and in the scenes filmed on the streets of Tehran, the women wore full hijabs, which, after Woman, Life, Freedom, could be perceived as a show of support for the government. Those who walked past the shooting location, citizens and law-enforcement officials alike, assumed that the actors were working on a project for state TV or for a filmmaker with close ties to the government. The police moved on without bothering them, while others insulted and cursed them for staying loyal to a repressive regime.
But what makes “Sacred Fig” a truly transgressive work is the footage that was filmed indoors. In Iranian cinema after the revolution, the law forbids women to appear onscreen without the full hijab, regardless of the location of the scene. In “Sacred Fig,” for the first time in their careers, actresses appeared without the covering. Those scenes, along with the ones shot out in the city, result in a film that feels like a hyper-real depiction of Iranian life. Rasoulof, too, further enhances that realism by incorporating found footage in the final cut. In the script, some scenes take place during street protests, which Rasoulof could not recreate without attracting attention. Instead, he intersperses documentary footage of ordinary people within the intimate family drama.
It is this adherence to depicting Iran as it is, rather than obliquely gesturing at its flaws, that makes “Sacred Fig” so bracing. The Iranian movies of the last decades rarely feature a classical villain. The characters’ redeeming qualities often outnumber the damning ones, and the moral universe in which they operate remains ambiguous. Portraying such characters as evil is punishable, so filmmakers have either avoided doing so altogether or tried to soften their edges.
In the patriarch of “Sacred Fig,” we have an unequivocal villain, a character whose darkness only deepens as the movie progresses; in the last act of the movie, he violently drags his wife and a daughter into separate rooms, locks them up and abandons them in the cold. (Political prisoners in Iran are often placed in solitary confinement, though a representation of that predicament is absent from Iranian cinema, which makes the scene all the more shocking.) Watching Rasoulof’s unadorned, unambiguous portrait is to watch a cinematic indictment of those who uphold the status quo. “In a totalitarian system, every single morning you get out of the bed facing moral questions,” he told me. “The good and the bad are more in contrast in that system than elsewhere. You can’t work in that society and ignore this fact.”
During his most recent prison sentence, as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement was first unfolding, Rasoulof was taken to the hospital for an operation. Over the course of his weeklong recuperation, groups of three guards watched him at all times in the hospital room. The first shift included two conscripts performing their military service and a new hire at the prison. After each 24-hour rotation, a new trio of guards would keep watch.
During that first shift, a guard brought Rasoulof’s “There Is No Evil” on a thumb drive, and they watched the film on the TV in his hospital room. One story depicts a group of conscripts tasked with carrying out a hanging. In a room full of bunk beds, a young soldier scheduled to commit his first execution cannot sleep. He is shaken and nauseated and keeps calling his girlfriend outside the prison, begging her to help him get out of the job. His terror keeps everyone awake. The group of young men fiercely debate the ethics of what they are assigned to do. Some argue that they are merely abiding by the law of the land. Others contend that killing is killing, and a man has the agency to defy orders he finds morally reprehensible.
In Rasoulof’s hospital room, the guards watched the movie and thanked him profusely for the honest portrayal of their lives and preoccupations, then passed the thumb drive to the next shift. Over the course of his hospitalization, Rasoulof had to watch his movie once a day with his captors.
In telling this story, Rasoulof was more animated than in any other moment in our conversation. “You can’t make this up!” he said several times, even re-enacting how he lay on the hospital bed, the guards’ body language and their words. For a man who has woven the daily struggles of Iranians into his work with all their paradoxes and disparities, their highs and lows, it is only natural that his greatest prize comes from the reaction of the people whose stories he observed with such clarity.
Rasoulof still lives in Germany, the country he had visited many times and where his daughter has lived for years. This familiarity makes the landing softer, but he still hasn’t had a chance to process this new phase in his life. “I had the opportunity to live comfortably outside Iran for some 20 years,” Rasoulof said in a recent interview with Radio Farda, “but I was determined to stay as long as I could keep my camera on.” He constantly finds himself struggling with the fact that his next trip will not be back to Iran while castigating himself for what he sees as parochiality. “This whole earth is yours too,” he keeps telling himself. “So just learn to live and work wherever you happen to be.”
But he is certain about one thing. “I will go back there. It could be next week or a few years down the line, after making a few movies here. But I know that I will go back.”
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