The Seed of the Sacred Fig: A Way Must Be Made

Missagh Zareh and Soheila Golestani in Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Part political chronicle, part thriller and part family drama, the Iranian film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, is complex and terrifying. Like Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, released last summer, it captures an ongoing situation so disturbing that we can’t shake it off when we leave the theatre. Its focus is on Iman (Missagh Zareh), who works in the justice system, and on his family: his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and their two teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), who is at university, and Sana (Setareh Maleki), still in high school. Iman has just been promoted to interrogator, which puts him on track to become a judge, a distinction that brings with it not just a more enviable salary but also a larger house. But as his colleague, Ghaderi (Reza Akhlaghirad), cautions him, the job is dangerous because those who believe they have been charged unjustly may seek revenge on him and his family. It carries moral perils as well: Iman, who has behaved with strict rectitude during a twenty-year career, is immediately asked to sign off on a wiretapping without having a chance to read the file; when he hesitates, his supervisor overrides him. And things get worse. Tehran has been swept up in protests over the arrest of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini for wearing her hijab improperly, and her suspicious death in custody, he is pressured to confirm death indictments against other young people, one a boy the same age as Rezvan.

Najmeh, trying to be Iman’s helpmate, worries about his state of mind. And she lectures their daughters about the necessity for the family of a man in a position that makes them highly visible on social media to be seen as above reproach. So when Rezvan asks to put up her friend Sadaf (Niousha Askshi) before she can move into her dorm Najmeh hesitates. Living in a dorm makes Sadaf look more independent than a young Iranian woman should be, and the Women, Life, Freedom protests are largely being enacted by college students. Najmeh ultimately agrees to let Sadaf stay for a single night as long as Iman doesn’t see her. But when she returns to the dorm she’s caught in a crowd of protesters and badly beaten by the police. The two daughters sneak her back into the house so they can take care of her, and Najmeh finds her there. When she sees the young woman’s battered face her humanity and her maternal instincts win out. But another crisis comes on top of this one: Iman’s gun disappears from their home. If he reports it, Ghaderi counsels him, it will affect his career; he may even be arrested.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig takes in the police brutality, which the sisters watch clandestinely on their phones through illegal channels while the government-sponsored television news censors it, offering a bogus medical reason for Amini’s murder. But Rasoulof’s scathing indictment of the conduct of a totalitarian state is centered on the effect on Iman and his family. Najmeh’s daughters quarrel with her about the justness of the law of the country; Iman has always acted in the conviction that it’s God’s law, and Najmeh echoes his point of view, but we see that she’s filtering this idea through her husband’s moral quandary over having to sign those death warrants. She feels that the increased time he has been obliged to spend away from his family since his promotion has lessened his influence over the girls, but when he interrogates them and his wife over the disappearance of his firearm and they all insist they didn’t touch it, the extremes he ends up going to in increasingly desperate attempts to bring the truth to light tear the family apart.

The film winds to a climax that is horrifying partly because of its inevitability. Iman’s actions are increasingly monstrous. Rasoulof presents them as simultaneously a mirror reflection of the system he’s embroiled in and a depiction of the consequences of that system. (That double image links The Seed of the Sacred Fig to a very different but similarly masterful dramatization of the effects of totalitarianism, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, set in the late days of the German Democratic Republic.) All four of the leading actors are impressive, but Golestani’s performance as Najmeh, the character who resides at the point where the political intertwines with the familial, is remarkable.

The title of the movie sounds hopeful, but the explanation offered in a prefatory subtitle is sinister. The fig, we’re told, sheds its droppings on the trees around it and strangles them so that in the end only “the sacred fig” remains. We understand the metaphor: the Iranian government’s fundamentalist version of Islam obliterates everything around it. Fortunately, another subtitle offers the hope that the metaphor denies: Rasoulof filmed the movie in secret and sent it to be edited in Germany before he made his own escape from Iran. “Where there’s no way,” the title explains, “a way must be made.”

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.