Mohammad Rasoulof’s powerful film on Iran during the Women, Life, Freedom protests deserves high praise, but the role of imperialism is missing, writes Shabbir Lakha

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a powerful and harrowing political drama/thriller set in Iran during the Women, Life, Freedom protests of 2022-23. The film has already won a number of awards, was nominated for a Golden Globe and is nominated for Best International Feature Film at the upcoming Academy Awards.

The sharp political commentary of the film is deserving of the accolades the film receiving, as is the bravery of those who produced the film. Director Mohammad Rasoulof has already spent time in prison and had his passport revoked for his previous films and for speaking out against the government. When the government became aware of The Seed of the Sacred Fig, he was sentenced to 8 years in prison and had to flee the country on foot. The footage had to be smuggled out of the country and production was finished in Germany. Some of the actors, including the female lead, remain in Iran, barred from travel and facing prosecution.

The secrecy of the filming has meant that it is a fairly low-key production, but this has aided the simple, powerful narrative it presents. The bulk of the film is shot in the two-bedroom flat of the main characters, and the final act in the picturesque, desolate rural town of Kharanaq, south of Tehran. The film not-so-subtly symbolises the oppressive rule of the Iranian government so to that aim, the home-setting is not only practical but represents the encroachment of the state in the personal, and makes the parallel from the family setting to that of the nation easier to follow.

The film’s plot begins in the immediate aftermath of the murder of Mahsa Amini by religious police for wearing ‘improper hijab’ and the widespread protests that it sparked. The film is interspersed throughout with actual footage of the protests, mostly captured on mobile phones.

Iman (Missagh Zareh) is a lawyer who has worked for the state prosecution and has just been promoted to ‘investigating judge’ in the Revolutionary Court. In a country facing extreme international sanction that has crippled its economy, working for the state is one of the few means of secure employment, and fewer still that provide a decent income. Naturally then, Iman is pleased with his promotion and the newfound security it will afford his family, but is immediately placed in a predicament which threatens all.

As the protests escalate, his first task is to rubber stamp the execution of a political activist, an 18 year-old boy, without any formal investigation of criminality. As someone who believes his job is to find the truth and act in the way of God, this doesn’t sit well with his conscience. But to refuse is to forfeit the job altogether – and to place himself as a suspect in the eyes of the state. He now risks not just losing a more secure future for him and his family, but the little they had before.

The job also means that he and his family must keep what he does a secret. This secrecy sows the seed of a paranoia that takes root and becomes the undoing of everything he holds dear. He is given a gun for protection which becomes the symbol of a false security turned instrument of insecurity, and at the same time an expression of power.

Iman’s wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), begins the film in a Lady Macbeth role and is a representation of an older generation of women in a moment of political rupture. Caught in the dream of a less precarious life for her and her two teenage daughters, she counsels her husband to silence his conscience, helps to justify his actions, and takes a hard line against her own daughters when they espouse anything close to sympathy for their fellow students being brutalised by the police.

The cracks in her persona begin to emerge when her older daughter Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) brings home her close friend who has been savagely injured by police while protesting at school. Still, she supports her husband even as he turns against his daughters, and only when his paranoia turns on her does the reality of the monster she has helped encourage begin to dawn on her.

Both Rezvan and her younger sister Sana (Setareh Maleki) are high school students, and so are exposed to the frontlines of the uprising against the government. They see the brutality first hand and on social media, they see the innocence of their fellow classmates that defies the lies they hear in the news and find themselves in opposition to their own father.

It’s clear that Iman is a representation of the regime itself. His paranoia against his own family is an expression of the repression the state is meting out against its own population. During the Mahsa Amini protests, between 300 – 550 protesters were killed, there were up to 20,000 arrests and at least 7 executed.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig, perhaps could have been a bit shorter (2h47m runtime) and punchier but nonetheless presents an inside view of repression and resistance. It offers a sophisticated and fairly nuanced political commentary. The same cannot be said for the many reviews in western mainstream media.

For The Financial Times, the family’s initial support for Iman’s promotion which could mean a bigger apartment is an example of ‘mundane trades,’ through which ‘tyrannies tick on’. There’s no mention that nearly 30% of Iran’s population live in poverty and a further 40% at risk of falling into poverty – largely due to western sanctions.

The Guardian lazily describes the 2022-2023 protests as ‘anti-hijab’ protests. This is flatly untrue. The protests were demanding the right of women to not wear hijab or to wear hijab without state coercion. They became an opposition to state violence and for democracy. It’s precisely because the protests involved religious Muslims (who are not in fact anti-hijab), that the uprising posed the biggest threat to the Iranian state since the Revolution.

It is also jarring to read about the bold feminism of the film by writers and in publications that have had little to say about the mass murder of women in Gaza for the last 15 months. Or for that matter, the lack of freedom to criticise the regime demonstrated by the director having to flee Iran, in a country where Julian Assange was held in Belmarsh for 5 years and the police are currently persecuting Palestine activists.

In the film, when Iman and later his daughters question the response to the protests, the answer they get is that they are fuelled by ‘foreign elements’ and outside propaganda. Many reviews casually mention this as just an example of irrational paranoia. We are expected to forget the very real interference by the US and UK in overthrowing Iran’s democratically-elected leader in 1953, or the well-documented activity of the CIA inside Iran.

It is no surprise that the Women, Life, Freedom protests which were led by young people but spread across the country and generalised into an anti-government movement and which created all kinds of new forms of civil society organisation, came to an end in October 2023. It was the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the position it put the Iranian government in – of both supporting Palestinian resistance and inevitably facing direct attack from Israel (which it did) – that put a stop to the momentum of the protests.

The biggest block to progressive change in Iran and the Middle East is western imperialism. The attempts at regime change and threat of actual war help to fortify an embattled regime which otherwise lacks popular support. The economic sanctions have impoverished Iranian people, make it harder for them to organise independently, can give legitimacy to the regime’s actions, and have helped hardliners win over moderates – for example after Trump pulled out of the JCPOA and reinstated sanctions.

These issues are beyond the scope of the film to explore and do not detract from its powerful narrative. It is, however, necessary context.