Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof: ‘The regime has already lost the game’
Up for an Academy award, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an act of resistance from a director now living in exile
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Meeting Mohammad Rasoulof in a hotel room in London feels somewhat miraculous. This time last year the award-winning director was still in Iran, banned from leaving, and his passport confiscated by the state. In May 2024 he was sentenced to eight years in prison and flogging for openly criticising the government, both in personal statements and through his film-making. His latest work, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, has now been nominated for best international feature at this year’s Oscars.
When Rasoulof was handed his sentence, he decided to flee Iran on foot, eventually making his way to Germany where he now lives in exile. “I was not even halfway through the shoot. I wasn’t really sure that we would never manage to complete it. I really had no hope,” he says.
For 15 years, Rasoulof had navigated strict government censorship to question the Iranian regime using his art, often facing serious consequences. His 2017 film A Man of Integrity, which tells the story of a fish farmer battling local authority corruption, led to Rasoulof being barred from leaving the country. Three years later, the Berlin Golden Bear-winning There Is No Evil tackled the death penalty in Iran, for which he was sentenced to a year in prison. He’s twice served time in jail, including days in solitary confinement.
During all his encounters with the security forces over the years, Rasoulof says that he found himself asking the same question: “I was wondering constantly, what enables them to think the way they do, why do we think so differently?”
That search for answers became the foundation of The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a bold and uncompromising drama that exposes the emotional strain of government oppression in Iran.
Speaking through a translator, Rasoulof explains that the film’s narrative came into full focus through “a chance encounter” with a senior prison official during his last stint in jail, between July 2022 and February 2023. “He told me in private that he’d come to hate himself, that he was constantly pressurised and deeply criticised by his family and children about his job, being asked ‘How can you collaborate with this oppression machine?’” Rasoulof says.
This conversation took place while outside the prison walls the streets were exploding with mass protests following the death in police custody of Jina (also known as Mahsa) Amini, who had been detained for not properly wearing a hijab. Rasoulof saw the demonstrations as one of the routes to find the voice of the film. “I, like so many of us, was absolutely stunned by this young Iranian generation,” he says.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig takes this historic women-led uprising and explores how the patriarchal regime creeps into the family home and what can be done to resist it. Missagh Zareh plays Iman, who works as an investigator for the Iranian Revolutionary Court. Against the backdrop of the Women, Life, Freedom protests, the audience sees the growing divide between Iman and his family, and his daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), becoming increasingly critical of his job.
“It became bigger than the story of this individual family. It became symbolic of a much greater system at play of totalitarianism, of the patriarchy,” Rasoulof explains.
Rasoulof has consistently used his art to explore themes of authoritarianism and social injustice in Iran. But by moving the focus to the direct instigators of repression — the Revolutionary Guard — the director knew he would face more punishment for his work.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig had to be made in secret, with Rasoulof directing remotely from secure locations in Iran, and later in Germany. While he wasn’t physically present on set, he says he “felt that every single actor and member of the crew of the film became me somehow, in that environment. They really did everything in their power to shorten the physical distance between us.”
That unity of mind proved crucial in avoiding the gaze of the authorities while filming. “You have to take all these impromptu decisions in the moment,” he says. In one scene filmed at a petrol station where Iman gets into a confrontation with strangers who know that he’s an investigator for the government, “we’d shot about half of what we needed and all of a sudden we’ve got to wrap up the shoot here in the next hour.” Rather than finding a new location and adding risk to cast and crew, Rasoulof rewrote the script for the scene in 10 minutes, so they could wrap there and then.
Within these limitations, Rasoulof decided to use real-life footage of the demonstrations taken from social media, including brutal state violence against the protesters. “The footage was so raw and real and strong, that even under ideal circumstances, there’s no way I would have been able to achieve the same strength of the documentary evidence,” he says.
Rasoulof also sees a deeper meaning in those recordings. They represent a “very different landscape in Iran, compared to the landscape we were in just 20 years ago”, he says. “Whenever there’s a confrontation between civilians and anyone working on the armed side of the regime, both sides will immediately take out mobile phones and start filming one another. In a way it’s like a war of narrative, both recording and sharing a narrative and sharing their version of the truth with others.”
To Rasoulof, that signifies hope. “On the one hand, the regime has already lost the game. We see it in the film: the younger generation seeks out its truth in a different way — not just in Iran but everywhere, with this interconnected world we now live in.”
While Rasoulof successfully fled the country, the status of the rest of the crew on The Seed of the Sacred Fig is uncertain. The film’s director of photography’s office was raided, while some of the cast and crew are facing travel bans, interrogations and even threats to their families. But none of this takes away from the work accomplished. The fact that the film was released, let alone finished, is a victory in itself.
“I’m very happy that it is on its way, that it has been able to travel. I think it gives us all a sense of pride,” Rasoulof says. “But I think it’s also very important in motivating, inspiring and showing film-makers all over the world that there’s a lot you can do with very limited means and under difficult circumstances.”
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is now in cinemas.
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