For filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, the idea for his new film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” came not from a screenwriter or producer but from one of his jailers in the prison where he’d been sentenced for his criticism of the Iranian government.
Though the broader inspiration had been in mind for much longer, he notes.
“I should preface this by saying that the film is based on a question that lived with me, stayed with me for years,” Rasoulof says on a recent video call, speaking in Farsi through a translator. “It had to do with the difference between someone like me and those who submit themselves to power.”
For Rasoulof, the cost of not submitting to the censorship and restrictions of the Iranian leadership came with a high price. The acclaimed films such as “Manuscripts Don’t Burn,” “There Is No Evil,” and “Goodbye” won at festivals around the world was balanced by the personal sacrifices and loss of liberty he faced at home.
In 2017, his passport had been confiscated on his return to Iran, stripping him of his ability to leave the country to make movies abroad. In 2019, he was convicted by the Islamic Revolutionary Court for various charges stemming from his 2017 film “A Man of Integrity.” A year later, he was sentenced to another year for three of his movies that the court ruled were “propaganda against the system.”
In 2022, he found himself again imprisoned, this time after criticizing the government’s response to the deadly collapse of an apartment building, and it was in prison this time he met the man who would inspire “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which opens Wednesday, Nov. 27, and is Germany’s official entry for the Oscar for best international film.
As Rasoulof was checking on the wellbeing of a fellow political prisoner who had gone on a hunger strike, a group of senior officials from the prison, judiciary and government entered the cell.
“I happened to be in his cell when they arrived, checking for signs of life, really,” Rasoulof says. “So I just went into a corner to sort of let them get on with it and leave. But one of them detached himself, very carefully, making sure that the others didn’t notice, and came to talk to me.”
The man pulled a pen out of his pocket and offered it to Rasoulof, and then apologized to him for the fact that the director was in prison.
“He then told me that he was doing pretty badly,” Rasoulof says. “That he constantly thought about suicide. And that every day when he came to work in the prison, he’d sort of have a good look at the entrance gate, and he’d ask himself each time, ‘Is this the day that I’m going to hang myself from it?’”
Unlike Rasoulof, the prison official had chosen to do what the oppressive government of Iran dictated, regardless of his own beliefs.
“His children, at the same time, were really criticizing him,” Rasoulof continued. “Non-stop asking him all the time, ‘What are you doing? Why are you working in jails? Why are you killing people there?’ So he was under a great deal of pressure at home.
“And so that’s where I got the idea that it would be very interesting to tell a story about a family where there is such a big rift. At the same time, the father figure would allow me to delve into this sort of personality that I’d been wondering about for years.”
But Rasoulof was still in prison.
Protests to moving pictures
In September 2022, a young Iranian woman was arrested by the morality police for not wearing a hijab in public. Mahsa Amini died in hospital under suspicious circumstances – witnesses said police beat her, the police said she had a heart attack in custody – and the widespread public protests that followed became known as the Women, Life, Freedom Movement.
For Rasoulof, who followed and supported the protests from prison, the movement also led to his early release thanks to the flood of arrested protestors that overcrowded jails and prisons.
At home, he wrote the screenplay for “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” In it, an investigator named Iman is promoted to be an investigative judge, a position in which his conscience initially protests the duties he is assigned. When he submits, his mental state declines.
His wife, Najmeh, at first is excited at the possibilities his new job might provide the family. His high school and college-aged daughters, Sana and Rezvan, who are told nothing about the work their father does, empathize with the Women, Life, Freedom protests even as their parents warn them to stay away.
The film is both an intimate portrait at a family torn apart and a sweeping political thriller set amid real-life events. Film clips of the protests posted on social media are woven into the narrative giving it a sense of immediate urgency.
Yet initially, Rosoulof thought it might not be possible to make, given the scrutiny the government kept him under.
“I told myself, ‘Look, it’s impossible. It’s so ambitious. There’s just no way you can shoot this,’” he says. “I started writing a different script that was set inside my house and was a sort of melange between fiction and a film about myself, that would have been a mixture of a film and animation.
“Then I consulted with my friends, with whom I always talk about my work, and they really were adamant that I make the first one,” Rasoulof says.
But how could he do that, he wondered.
Guerrilla filmmaking
Faced with making a film that if discovered would, at best, get shut down, and at worst, end up with cast and crew members arrested, Rasoulof and his small team came up with three strategies to fly beneath the government’s prying eyes.
“The first was that we’d have a tiny cast and crew,” Rasoulof says. “The second is that we’ll have very limited equipment. And third would be that I should almost never be on set. Or rather, I should always keep some distance from the actual set.”
At times, he would even watch scenes being shot from inside “a safety structure” out of sight but nearby, he says. To minimize the possibility of leaks, the hiring of cast and crew only revealed pieces of the story in stages. Would you work on a film that had no permits? Would you work with actresses who did not wear veils?
“Until we were 100 percent certain that these people would be ready and happy to collaborate on a film that had this kind of defiance, we certainly couldn’t tell them anything,” Rasoulof says. “Nor reveal the script and story, nor reveal the identity of the director.”
Fearful that any moment the authorities might stumble onto the shoot, Rasoulof and his team put in place emergency protocols.
“We had a Plan B in place, which we had to use a number of times because, yes, there were inspections,” he says. “And so the moment that began, the whole set changed to the making of a different film with a different director, who was one of the assistants, and so on. We actually had to stop shooting a number of times out of fear.
“But somehow we managed to complete the shoot.”
Fleeing home
Earlier this year, when “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” was chosen for the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Iranian interrogators began questioning the cast and crew.
Rasoulof received word around then that he would be sentenced to eight years in prison, a flogging and financial penalties for his cumulative films and outspokenness and decided he would flee the country without permission or a passport instead.
“I knew that the only outcome of going back to prison would be this – it would be to say I am a filmmaker,” Rasoulof says. “I am being sacrificed because of the censorship that dominates this country. And I really didn’t want to play that role. I wanted to keep making films.”
As he made plans to slip across the border to escape, his time in prison provided an unexpected positive, Rasoulof says.
“Now that we’re talking about prison, I’m only mentioning the negative aspects,” he says, smiling broadly. “But it does have some positive aspects. For instance, that’s where I met the people who at the moment I had to leave, illegally, of course, I knew who to call and get their help to leave the country.
“So in a way, those seven, eight months I spent this last time around in prison were really like a present.”
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” was nominated for the Palme d’Or, the top prize at Cannes, but did not win. It did, however, collect five other awards there.
It is not likely to be seen, at least not openly, in Iran, Rasoulof knows. But with a vast Iranian diaspora, including the largest population outside of Iran in the United States, and more than half of those in California, he hopes it can reach hearts and minds wherever it is seen.
“You know, we’re living in a day and time where Iran is not restricted to geographical Iran,” Rasoulof says. “Technology allows us to live in what I like to call cultural Iran, which extends beyond its borders and whereby we’re all connected by technology. Both Iranians inside Iran and Iranians outside Iran all inhabit this cultural Iran, a world that takes place through mobile phones, social media, the virtual world.
“I hope this cultural Iran may allow, may enable Iranians to trust one another,” he says of the culture in general, and his film within it. “Because the most important way the Islamic Republic operates is by polarizing people and sowing the seeds of mistrust, so that it can continue its own job.”
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