The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig premiered at Cannes 2024 and won a Special Award; in Germany the film won the Lola for Best Film (Silver) and Best Actor for Missagh Zareh. The film was shot in secret in Iran, in defiance of Rasoulof's existing eight-year prison sentence handed down by the Islamic Republic for previous works. Rasoulof himself fled Iran on foot through mountainous border country before the film's Cannes premiere, and the cast and crew remain in varying degrees of jeopardy.

Iman (Missagh Zareh), a long-serving lawyer in Tehran's Revolutionary Court, is finally promoted to investigating judge, a position requiring him to sign execution orders for protesters. His government-issued service pistol disappears from the family home during the 2022 Mahsa Amini uprisings, and Iman's increasing paranoia turns him on his wife Najmeh and his two daughters Rezvan and Sana. The film moves between domestic claustrophobia and inserted protest-mobile-phone footage, and finally to a third-act flight from the city that re-stages, with a chilling literalism, the spiritual collapse of the Iranian state.

The film is at once a domestic thriller, a political allegory, and a real-time act of political witness. Its release coincided with the largest sustained street protests in Iran in over forty years; it operates as a record of how those protests are being lived inside the homes of the system's officials.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most morally consequential European co-production of 2024, and a film whose existence was an act of political courage by everyone involved. A reminder that cinema can still bear witness when bearing witness costs.