The director who wasn’t there: Mohammad Rasoulof on The Seed of the Sacred Fig
After years of run-ins with the authorities, the Iranian director was forced to direct his most recent film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, remotely and in secret. But the methods are at odds with the film’s direct and open criticism of the country’s repressive regime. From our March 2025 issue.
“I am very close to nature. I spend a great deal of time in the mountains. If Iran becomes a free country one day, I’d love to make wildlife documentaries,” says Mohammad Rasoulof, who fled the country last year, crossing the mountainous terrain of western Iran on foot with nothing, not even a passport (which had been confiscated). He sought refuge in Germany and added the final touches there to The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which premiered in Cannes last May. The man who could have been the David Attenborough of Iran is, until further notice, one of the foremost clandestine filmmakers from that country. “For now, the freedom and dignity of man are my top priorities,” he says. “I keep asking myself why a system allows itself to do this to us.”
Rasoulof’s frequent provocation of the Iranian regime has led to multiple prison sentences, as well as passport and asset removals, but the dissident filmmaker has created some of his more formally audacious work during these years of relentless turmoil and harassment. We met in London while he was in transit from Ukraine (where he had served as president of the jury at Kyiv’s Molodist film festival) to the US, where, the day before, Donald Trump had been elected to a second presidential term.
The last time I spoke to him, he told me that to avoid being recognised by the regime’s agents he wore heavier make-up on set than the actors. Now, he has come up with a new solution. “Because there was a possibility of the regime raiding the set, I made this film from afar. Most of the time, I wasn’t physically present on set, or I was a few kilometres away. Sometimes I was a hundred or two hundred metres away. For the car scenes, I was in the back of a car driving behind the production cars. The idea was, ‘I’m not there.’ I had two assistants who were in constant contact with me.”
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is based on the events surrounding the September to December 2022 uprising of Iranian women – a protest movement named Women, Life, Freedom – that took Iran by storm and sent thousands on to the streets of Berlin, Paris, London and cities around the world in solidarity. The film incorporates footage shot by citizens during the protests and makes dramatic use of facts such as the firing of shotgun pellets by police directly at the faces and genitals of female protesters. The hacking of names and addresses by oppressors of the Islamic regime is another detail Rasoulof has woven into his story.
“I said to myself, ‘You are telling the story of a family trapped in their apartment. They are afraid to go outside. How are you going to show what is happening outside?’ Let’s say that, hypothetically, I had permission to shoot this film and a street was at my disposal. Was I going to re-enact events when the power of reality in social media footage is so strong? So I chose the most iconic images. I didn’t use unseen footage and sound bites. Instead, I said, ‘Let’s show what has been seen and is familiar to everybody.’”
Rasoulof has been preoccupied with the inhumanity of the justice system since his early days as a documentary filmmaker, but here his washed-out images and the suffocating world of the family take on a sharper edge. There is no ambiguity in the film’s intentions. Unlike the stark bleakness of his previous works, The Seed of the Sacred Fig portrays ordinary people rising up against oppression in an act of resistance. In front of a backdrop of images of the state’s heroes and martyrs, vulgarised as paperboard cut-outs, stand women who carry the weight of the story once the film shifts its focus from the father of the family, Iman (which means ‘faith’), who has been promoted to the position of interrogator in the judiciary. His hope of acquiring a larger flat is shattered when the women’s uprising and the loss of his gun result in an emotionally violent confrontation with his two rebellious daughters.
“We are talking about a specific type of family in which submissiveness has been inherent. We see this in the photograph of the father as a young man on the wall, taken at the Imam Reza shrine [a sacred site in Iran], where he has placed his hand on his chest – a gesture of total submission to the religious ideal. The same submissiveness has influenced politics and the military, hence the cut-outs of martyrs and deceased religious figures. Submissiveness and conformity are the main themes of the film. I realised that insecurity can turn people into submissive figures. The father wants to give this attitude an air of sanctity and expects the family to follow suit.”
When Sana, the younger daughter, escapes from her father, in a scene reminiscent of the family’s terror in The Shining (1980), she finds refuge in a shed where religious props for the annual Shia mourning ritual are stored. In this space of presumed veneration she discovers tapes of pioneering female singers predating the 1979 revolution – voices now banned. These and the removal of the mandatory hijab are some of the taboos that Rasoulof breaks. Adopting a more head-on approach, the film strives to move beyond the mode of representation that Iranian cinema has excelled in since the 1960s: allegory.
“I decided to put away allegorical and metaphorical language because I felt it was a form of self-censorship. I decided to be myself. What matters to a dictatorship is that you aren’t yourself. Stripping someone of their sense of self is what happens in that system. The aesthetics I had used over the years were what I call the ‘aesthetics of tyranny’. I decided to reject them.”
Despite its directness, the film still employs some allegorical imagery to enrich the narrative effectively. This kind of symbolism is apparent, among other scenes, in the abandoned ruin where the final act unfolds. The ruin, a significant symbol in Persian poetry and cinema – particularly in the work of Rasoulof ’s fellow Shiraz-born director Ebrahim Golestan, godfather of the Iranian New Wave – also serves a practical purpose. The ingenious use of this space helps to reframe the story in line with the secretive nature of the shoot, allowing the filmmakers to stay out of sight of the regime’s watchful eyes.
“Allegory doesn’t serve the same function, but if you can use it creatively, go for it,” says Rasoulof. “Let me confess something: I never thought I was going to finish this film, so I said, ‘Be playful, do whatever you like, throw away your knowledge.’ I just wanted to get rid of everything I knew.”
Alongside this subtle symbolism, several of Rasoulof’s recurring motifs, such as water and washing as an act of purification, resurface. “That’s so me! In the worst situations, I feel that going for a swim would change my mood. I was also raised in a crowded family, and often the only place to have some privacy was in the bathroom!”
Until Rasoulof, few Iranian films explored political disillusionment through the lens of family and the toll it takes on those relationships, with the devastating Dead End (1977) by the now-exiled Parviz Sayyad being a rare exception.
“Family is the most basic social unit. I focus on things happening around me, including my own family. I come from a family of teachers – my parents and older siblings are all teachers; I am the only one in the family with a different vocation. In our family, especially with my mother, the focus was usually on solving people’s problems. Students used to come to our house for extra lessons. In the film, the wife/mother character, who tries to keep the family balanced and is always on a tightrope, is modelled on my mum and my aunt – people who are very selfless.”
The Seed was shot covertly but it is not a militant film – it is a thriller, with the conditions of its production mirroring that. Rasoulof owes more to the cinema of the 1970s – both Iranian and American – than to any other period in film history. Once Iman, the master of surveillance, feels he himself is being watched, the paranoia that turns the house upside down evokes The Conversation (1974). Then there’s Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977), with its themes of female bonding and burying the male figure.
Though these may be unconscious influences, Rasoulof is aware of how cinephilia has shaped his life. He tells me that even the guards at the notorious Evin prison in Tehran – where he was sent in 2022, before being released after detainees started to arrive following the protests – turned out to be enamoured with cinema.
“During my prison term, I was hospitalised twice. And by the way, I was taken there in the same green vans you see in the film, which were used for both prison and school transport; the driver was always in a rush to drop off the prisoners and go pick up the children. In the hospital, two soldiers guarded me. They were kindly and, out of respect for a filmmaker, didn’t lock my handcuffs. They were very curious about cinema, asking questions all the time. They brought a bootleg copy of my previous banned film There Is No Evil [2020] and played it every single day I was in the hospital. They were fascinated by how they were represented in the film, since it shows prison guards. They shared with me their wish to leave Iran and start a new life.”
Though his films are sombre and introspective, he tells these prison stories with a dark humour.
“Jafar [Panahi] and I were taken to the prison’s cultural office. They said, ‘You should make a movie for us in prison.’ Jafar and I were wondering, ‘Are we in a madhouse?’ We came up with the excuse that we don’t have a cameraman. The officer immediately replied, ‘Who do you want? We can arrest any cameraman you like!’”
When I asked him what keeps this ramshackle system – built on mendacity, cardboard heroes and deep disillusionment – propped up, he replied, without any hesitation: “Money. Brutality. Sanctification.” In doing so, he unwittingly explained what is causing the world to fall apart before our eyes.