As I sit with Mohammad Rasoulof’s filmography, I feel the weight of a man tunnelling relentlessly into the future. These films, born under surveillance, arrest, and exile, are seismic tremors, warning us of fault lines that stretch far beyond Iran’s borders. His early works, like Iron Island (2005), are cloaked in metaphor. By Goodbye (2011), Rasoulof’s critique grows sharper, more desperate. Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013) is a gut-punch, a fictionalized exposé of the regime’s assassination plots against intellectuals. A Man of Integrity (2017) is a slow-burn tale of a fish farmer resisting corruption. There Is No Evil (2020) dissects the moral rot of the death penalty through four interlocking stories. With The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024) Rasoulof delivers his loudest scream yet. Conceived in prison and shot in secret under impossible conditions, the film is a grenade lobbed at the heart of Iran’s theocratic regime, a regime that has sentenced its creator to eight years in prison and flogging for the crime of telling the truth. Smuggled out of Iran, and premiered at Cannes in 2024 against the explicit wishes of the Islamic Republic, this work is a testament to the courage of its exiled director and a scathing indictment of the suffocating machinery of authoritarianism. It is also, regrettably, a film that stumbles in its ambition, caught between the weight of its message and the demands of narrative coherence. Yet its flaws are dwarfed by its urgency, its moral clarity, and its unflinching portrayal of a society strangling itself in the name of divine order. The title, derived from the strangler fig—a plant that encases and chokes its host tree—serves as a potent metaphor for the Iranian regime’s parasitic grip on its people.
The film, near-three-hour long, follows Iman (Missagh Zareh), a newly promoted investigating judge in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, whose ascent coincides with the 2022 protests “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom) sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death in custody. Iman’s wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), and daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), navigate the domestic fallout of his role, which demands complicity in a regime that crushes dissent with judicial fiat. Iman represents the established order—both familial and political. As a paternal figure, he must protect his wife and daughters from the dangers of the protests; hence, his insistence on their conformity (e.g., wearing the hijab, avoiding protest-related discussions). As a judge and true believer in the Islamic Republic, he must uphold the law of the Iranian regime. His signing of death sentences against protesters is framed as a necessary act to maintain social order and protect the state’s “sacred” authority. From his perspective, this is a moral obligation to a higher law. It is a coherent position within the symbolic order he inhabits. Rezvan and Sana embody the principle of individual freedom and self-determination, which is inseparable from the broader “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” movement. The daughters assert their right to engage with the protests, to question the state’s theocratic rules (e.g., the hijab as a symbol of confinement), and to define their own identities. This is a universal claim to autonomy, a “right” grounded in their existence as subjects.
In Lacanian terms, the film is structured around a missing object, Iman’s gun, which functions as the objet petit a—the unattainable cause of desire that holds together the symbolic order of the family and, by extension, the state. When the gun vanishes, the entire edifice of patriarchal and state authority begins to unravel. The gun is not just a phallic symbol; it is the material embodiment of the state’s monopoly on violence, its ability to interpellate subjects into submission. And yet, as Lacan would insist, the objet petit a is always already lost, and its absence precipitates the collapse of the fantasy that sustains power. This is what Rasoulof shows us: the moment Iman’s gun—a symbol of his authority—goes missing, paranoia seeps into the family. It turns their home into a microcosm of Iran’s surveillance state, its desperate attempt to suture the gap in its own legitimacy. What begins as a slow-burn domestic drama of a family under siege, morphs into a psychological thriller, then a horror show, as Iman’s loyalty to the regime turns him into a microcosm of its brutality, interrogating his own family with the same cold detachment he applies to dissidents in his courtroom. Iman is caught in the dirty game of theocratic authority, his every utterance a citation of a larger script—God, law, order. Missagh Zareh’s performance, with its taut physicality and vocal restraint, erects a “decentered subject,” where identity is less a coherent self than a nexus of competing discourses. Iman’s alienation is not just from his family but from the very world they inhabit, a world where the mundane act of Sana wanting to dye her hair blue (a gesture of youthful rebellion) elicits his dogmatic retort: “It’s against God.”
The claustrophobic domestic space, with its pastel interiors, serves as an ideological mask, concealing the violence of the family’s complicity with the state. Interspersed with raw footage of the 2022 protests—grainy, visceral images of women tearing off hijabs and police brutality—the scenes gain a documentary urgency, blurring the line between fiction and reality. Rasoulof confronts viewers with the unaccountability of ideological violence and the uncanny resilience of the human spirit. Rasoulof’s mise-en-scène is haptic in its intensity, with close-ups of faces, glances, whispers, the rustle of fabric, the clink of cutlery, and so on. The family’s apartment, littered with everyday objects, becomes a site of tactile engagement, where the material world underscores a sense of suffocation in comfort. Silence punctuates the film’s visual verse, not empty but charged with the family’s fractured cohesion.
Najmeh, the mother, torn between loyalty to her husband and her daughters’ burgeoning defiance, is the tragic figure of heartbreaking complexity. Caught in what Althusser would call the “double bind” of ideology, she is both victim and enforcer, oscillating between her womanhood and her role as the obedient wife, the one who polices her daughters’ bodies and desires. In close-ups, Rasoulof forces us to confront her face, a palimpsest of duty and doubt—a site of ideological contradiction. In one of the film’s most searing sequences, Najmeh tends to Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), Rezvan’s college friend, who arrives at the apartment wounded from the Tehran riots, her face studded with buckshot. The camera lingers on her bloody face as Najmeh extracts each pellet in silence. Her expression is the face of ideology itself, simultaneously complicit and fractured, a subject who knows the truth but cannot act on it.
The daughters, Rezvan and Sana, are the true agents of the film’s revolutionary kernel. Rezvan’s outspoken rebellion and Sana’s silent defiance are not just generational; they are the return of the repressed, the feminine excess that the state cannot contain. Here, I must invoke Hegel’s notion of the “concrete universal”: the daughters are not merely individuals resisting a tyrannical father; they are the universal cry of freedom, embodied in the particularity of their bodies, their voices, their refusal to wear the hijab as a symbol of confinement. When Sana ultimately resorts to violence, it is not an act of personal vengeance but a shattering of the symbolic order. The patriarch falls, and with him, the state’s claim to divine authority.
Rasoulof refuses to romanticize the resistance. The film does not offer a utopian vision of liberation; it is too honest for that. Instead, it confronts us with the traumatic kernel of freedom: the fact that to resist is to risk everything, to inhabit the void of the Real where no guarantees exist. The “sacred fig” of the title is a bitter irony—a metaphor for the law, the state, the patriarch, all of which claim sanctity while sowing the seeds of their own destruction. When the daughter picks up the gun, she becomes the seed, the dangerous supplement that threatens to uproot the entire system. The film’s power lies in its refusal to resolve the tension between the public and the private. Iman, as both father and judge, is the ultimate figure of the Freudian superego, demanding obedience while secretly revelling in his own impotence. His promotion to investigative judge, his signing of death sentences, is a perverse act of enjoyment, a way of displacing his own guilt onto the bodies of protesters. But when the gun is lost, this enjoyment turns into paranoia, and the family becomes a battleground where the state’s insecurities are played out. The final act, set in the remote hills of Iman’s birthplace, is a descent into the primal scene of ideology—a place where the law is revealed as nothing more than a fragile fiction, sustained by violence and undone by a single act of defiance. The film depicts ideology as a spectral force. Iman’s unwavering faith in the Islamic Republic mirrors the notion of ideology as a fantasy that structures reality. His moral rigidity is less a personal flaw than a symptom of the theocratic system’s obscene underside: its reliance on violence to sustain an illusion of divine order. Sana’s violent act embodies a rupture that exposes the void beneath the state’s sacred fig, revealing its authority as a hollow construct.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is not just a film about Iran; it is a parable about the fragility of authoritarianism and the explosive potential of those it seeks to subjugate. Rasoulof, like his characters, risks everything to tell this story. And in doing so, he reminds us of what Marx knew all too well: the old world is dying, and the new one is born in the violent struggle of those who refuse to be silent. Rasoulof’s work reasserts that cinema has always been a medium of resistance, even as it faces its own senescence. When today’s audiences crave the quick fix of spectacle, the film’s slow unfolding demands patience. In the second half, this slow-burn domestic drama shifts into thriller territory—a tense car chase, pursuing protesters, a shoot-out. This transition, I suspect, is where the film begins to falter. The thriller elements, while gripping, risk diluting the parable’s subtlety, as if the film distrusts our capacity to sit with ambiguity. The finale is staged with electrifying finesse, culminating in a haunting final image. But I must admit, the resolution feels overly simplistic for Iran’s complex realities. In an era where difficulty in art meets resistance, The Seed of the Sacred Fig teeters on the edge of compromise. Yet its courage throughout most of its length remains undeniable. The question is not whether films like The Seed of the Sacred Fig will continue to be made—Rasoulof ensures they will—but whether they will retain cultural centrality. If audiences refuse to disconnect from their devices and sit in the dark with a film’s slow unfolding, then cinema risks becoming an easel painting: revered, subsidized, and relegated to a niche.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is not a perfect film, but it is a vital one, a songbird crying out in the dark, warning us of the noxious gases we can no longer ignore. As a filmmaker, Rasoulof wields his camera as a cultural seismograph, trembling with the fault lines of the world’s upheavals. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is just such a canary, fluttering in the dim tunnels of Iran’s theocratic regime. I watched this film not long ago, in a darkened cinema where the air felt thick with the shared breath of strangers, and found myself caught between awe and unease, as if the screen itself were whispering warnings of a world teetering on the edge.