Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is quite an extraordinary achievement. It was filmed entirely in secret and smuggled out of Iran to screen at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. This fact of its production also resonates strongly with its subject matter – a dissection of the thresholds between inside and outside, knowledge and ignorance, self and other, and male and female domains in contemporary Iranian society. Rasoulof’s screenplay revolves around a middle-class family – father Imam (Missagh Zareh), mother Namjeh (Sohelia Golestani) and daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). We meet Imam in an opening scene that evokes the covert conditions under which the film was composed – tight shots of him driving through Tehran, glimpses of highway barriers through the windows, and then a night rendezvous in the country, a more distant perspective now suggesting surveillance anxieties.
The narrative proper begins with a widening of the gulf between Iman’s professional life and his wife and daughter’s domestic life. Imam works as an investigator for the government and confesses to Namjeh that he has been forced to sign questionable death indictments. However, as he becomes more insecure and hyper-vigilant about his work for the government, he pulls back from his family, only informing them about his job when it’s absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, the women’s protests of 2022 and 2023 are taking place in the background, which means that government investigators are coming under heightened public scrutiny. Suspecting that his address has been discovered and shared amongst these activists, Imam effectively forces his wife and daughters into hiding, instructing them to behave conservatively, to avoid attracting attention, to spend as much time inside as possible, and to avoid sharing content or communicating with people on social media. That situation is further complicated when the women take in Sadaf, a friend of Rezvan’s, played by Niousha Akhshi, who is seriously injured in an interrogation, in an echo of Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody in 2023.
This imbues the film’s mise-en-scenes with a distinctly documentary quality. Since the directors operated in secret, our glimpses of the outside world are largely limited to furtive establishing shots and TikTok footage of the 2022-2023 protests. Even when we are inside, however, this same documentary quality remains. The dim lighting, hushed voices, drawn curtains and cold light not only evoke but enact a world that prohibits the free expression that the film exemplifies, which in turn reiterates the enormous dissonance between the public and private sphere in contemporary Iran. At times this recalls the glacial constrictions of domesticity in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 108 Bruxelles. Here, as there, the length of the film is a critical factor. At almost three hours, and shot almost entirely indoors (and in secrecy to boot), The Seed of the Sacred Fig generates an enormous and cumulative claustrophobia. Occasionally, it unleashes a torrent of affect, as in the aftermath of Sadaf’s assault, when Sana lies crying in bed and Rezvan maniacally peddles on her stat bike, as if hoping to fly straight out the window. For the most part, though, it simply accumulates, deadening the atmosphere and rendering the outside world further and further away.
There is thus an urgency inherent to the creation of this film, an anxiety that infuses every frame – after all, it may well have been a film that never found an audience. That urgency peaks with the narrative hinge that brings the film’s two worlds together. When Imam’s work gun goes missing, a mystery immediately ensues. It’s possible that he simply misplaced it, since this has occurred before. However, it’s also possible that one of the other three members of the family have hidden it. The consequences are dire – six months to three years in prison – so his first step is to consult a trusted colleague, who tells him he should never have disclosed to his family that he owned a gun (or anything else about his work life). With that option off the table, the colleague suggests that he interrogate each member of his family in turn.
From here domestic and institutional worlds start to converge, as Imam takes his wife and daughters to the home of a friend who also happens to be a skilled interrogator. From the outside this looks like a normal house but there is a security gate and metal detector just inside the door. Likewise, the living room seems relatively normal, but this also collapses into a more austere and carceral space, a series of blank empty rooms where the questioning takes place. This sense of cascading coordinates intensifies when the girls are blindfolded and Namjeh learns, on the spot, that she too will be interrogated. These scenes take on a particularly dehumanizing quality in the home of a trusted family friend, even or especially as they don’t yield any new information. Pleading, Imam asks Namjeh what is missing from her life that she could betray his trust, while taking the interrogator’s word over hers.
With the thresholds between domestic and institutional life collapsing in this way, the entire spatial fabric of the film starts to break down, propelling us outside for the first time, albeit not to the outside of urbanised middle-class Tehran. Instead, in an effort to nail down his paternal authority, Imam retreats, with his family, to his old childhood home deep in the desert, as if hoping to draw upon his own father’s more traditional sway over the women in his life. Before they arrive, however, the dissonance between the family and the father’s world reach their peak in the abstract and unreadable void of the desert. When Imam is recognised and filmed by a pair of protestors in a service station, he lures them off the road and into the sand dunes, where he holds them at gunpoint (with a replacement weapon) and instructs Namjeh to tie them up. As he’s doing so, the protestors reveal that Iman is perceived by many as an executioner rather than an interrogator, given the number of death warrants he has signed. It is at this moment, when the gulf between family and masculinity is most strained, that Sama reveals to Rezvan that she stole the gun.
The next part of the film teeters on the threshold of normality being tentatively restored. Following Imam’s extraordinary request for Namjeh to tie up the two protestors (we never see how this plays out), we shift to the daughters watching an old family video on a digital camera at Imam’s family home, as if attempting to reconstitute and revive their sense of themselves asa family. Yet this quickly gives way to a second interrogation scene, this time impelled by Imam himself, whose professional persona finally makes its way into the family sphere. These are some of the eeriest moments in the film, as Imam hovers between a father and interrogator, leaving his wife and daughters in existential freefall, unaware of what exactly is at stake in speaking back. First he locks them in the living room of the house, then he films Namjeh’s “confession” and finally, when Sama confesses and escapes, he locks Namjeh and Rezvan in the cellar of the house. The dimness of the opening half now returns in a heightened form, as Imam and Sama circle around each other outside, until Sama sets up a pair of ancient speakers and uses them to broadcast the audio of the family home video in one last desperate effort to invoke the unity it symbolized, although the digital recording is strange and hollow against the desert night.
The final act of the film involutes the inside and outside world once and for all, by way of a kinetic chase that unfolds in the ruins of an ancient city near Imam’s family home. Namjeh, Rezvan and Sama flee there the following morning and when Imam arrives, he chases them through the labyrinthine structure. It seems like this was originally a fairly porous space to begin with but the erosions of time, combined with the escalating vertigo of the chase, turn into a continuous threshold, a Moebius-like surface in which inside is always collapsing back into outside. It’s as if Rasoulof is visualizing the film’s own conditions of production at the cusp of public discourse in Iran. The closing image, of Imam, buried beneath a pile of dust, his hand stretching towards the sky, feels like an anguished cry on behalf of the film as well – for an open dialogue around strictures and conventions that suffocate whole families.