Seed of the Sacred Fig–Growing Dissension
Nominated for the 2025 Best International Film (Academy Awards), and the 2024 Festival Special Jury Prize (Cannes), Seed of the Sacred Fig is an Iranian thriller by the Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof.
“The Ficus Religiosa is a tree with an unusual life cycle. Its 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.”
In the opening scene an Iranian investigator, Iman (Missagh Zareh), a seemingly honest lawyer, has just been promoted to being an investigating judge in the new Revolutionary Court in Tehran. To the delight of his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) his promotion guarantees a bigger salary and a three-bedroom apartment. The condition for promotion, however, is rubber-stamping convictions, often with death sentences, with no evidence. Najmeh does not tell their college-age daughter, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and their teenage daughter Sana (Setareh Maleki), about their father’s job. She warns them that they must be conservative in behavior and appearance in order to protect their father and family.
Student protests soon erupt in the streets of Tehran, endangering the family’s complacency. Rezvan’s best friend, Sanaf (Niousha Akhshi), has been imprisoned after being brutally attacked. She ends up in Rezvan’s father’s court. Both daughters then begin to follow the street riots via social media, which contrasts sharply with the propaganda on government-sanctioned television news. Their unwavering moral support for the protests conflicts with their father’s position. His complicity becomes unacceptable and deplorable to them.
The violence the daughters secretly witness on their cell phones galvanizes them. As young women, in their first direct experience of the ruthlessness of the state’s theocratic oppression, panic consumes them. Feminist protests have broken out throughout the country after the murder of young journalist Mahsa Amini who violated the Sharia law requiring all women to wear the hijab.
In the director’s accomplished hands, the unbearable pressure placed on families by a relentless totalitarianism divides the entire nation, fracturing families. The personal becomes political, and no one escapes the consequences.
The viewer’s sympathy lies with Najmeh and her two daughters. At first Najmeh seems ambivalent about politics. Her concerns are to protect her family. As the touchstone of the family, Najmeh must navigate between the immoral demands impacting her husband and her daughters’ demands for social change and equal rights. Growing dissension and draconian measures to force complicity and submission eventually erode the assumed impervious facade of security and peace of mind. The ending of Seed of the Sacred Fig is actual footage sneaked out from the 2022–2023 protests that were violently suppressed by Iranian authorities. (For further coverage, see https://www.thewomensjournal.co.uk/womens-issues/iran-women-protests/) The footage speaks for itself, as a cautionary tale for us all: If you change nothing, nothing changes.
Seed of the Sacred Fig is a masterpiece of political filming, a witness to activism in real time. Oppression can never erase art of this caliber. This film remains banned in Iran.
Availability: Netflix
Note: The writer and director, Mohammad Rasoulof, was sentenced to eight years in prison by Iranian authorities, but he successfully escaped to Germany. Shooting Seed of the Sacred Fig clandestinely, Rasoulof’s cinematography is even more dazzling under those circumstances. The camera caresses the characters’ faces, their emotions etched like classical engravings.
Note 2: F. religiosa (Bodhi Tree) requires the agonid wasp as its pollinator. This fig wasp lays its eggs only on trees of this species, causing the roots to penetrate the stem of the support tree, eventually splitting it from within.