The Seed of the Sacred Fig Review: Speaking Truth in a Totalitarian World
My first movie review to be published on Tears of Things. First viewed at The Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace, Cremorne, Sydney, in February 2025.
Although braveness is a virtue attributed to a great array of films and television shows today, the “courage” requisite for accepting a generous paycheck to pose in an air-conditioned studio on the Burbank lot, is somehow dubious. Add to this the pampering from producers who claim certain ethnicities or gender orientations are somehow rarified and prized delicacies of the photographed world, and any shred of “courage” pales against the plucky daring-do of director Mohammad Rasoulof, whose vision and genuine courage gave birth to “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” among true perils and danger. One of the many joys of cinema is that everyone, regardless of identity, gets his moment to shine in his own perfectly unique story that offers a unique perspective, both teaching and entertaining his audience in the process. Such is the democratization the camera makes possible. But nobody has the right to call this “bold”, “brave” or “ballsy” like the man who defied his authoritarian government to birth a film whose message would have seen him jailed for 8 years in an Iranian jail - had he not fled last-minute to Germany for refuge. He now lives in Europe, exiled from his country of birth. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” became Germany’s entry for the 97th Academy Awards, and was ultimately nominated for Best International Feature Film.
At its heart, “Sacred Fig” is a film about truth and lies – and what happens to us when we live by lies. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn unwittingly wrote a prototype of the film’s premise in the early 20th century, even holding to the agrarian theme: “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” “Sacred Fig” offers a strong contrast between generational tendencies – a corrupt anti-moralism embodied in a world of grown-up bureaucracy, and a more humane compassion that leans young and vulnerable.
As Solzhenitsyn says, failure to censor evil on one hand, and persecution of the righteous on the other, are indeed both capital offences against truth. “Sacred Fig” presents itself as a moral cautionary tale, the results of living a lie. If untruthful words threaten life, untruthful actions are perfectly lethal. Iman’s promotion to judge kickstarts the trouble, when his day-to-day makes unconscionable demands of his moral values. The demand for velocity in his work leaves no time to determine the fairness of the cases he must pass judgement on. Failure to execute his job will result in feelings of incompetence, loss of self-worth, and cancellation; proficiency will undermine his very sense of objective truth. This challenge to his innate sense of justice knocks him into a head spin as he struggles to reconcile professional and personal values. His cop-out of a decision to unfairly sentence detainees of the Tehranian government strikes his moral discernment a fatal blow at the same time as it germinates the seed of distrust deep within his own family. From this time on, nothing can be the same. The audience learns that seeds can bring forth not just fruit, but also thorns.
In keeping with aspects of the traditional domestic values this tale is ensconced within, Iman’s moral failure as father signals the beginning of the collapse of the family’s sum integrity. Just as his act of untruthfulness at work surreptitiously opens the door to wholesale dishonesty elsewhere in his life, so the absence of a protector makes the family vulnerable to the same ills. Iman believes he can restrict his inner demons to the judicial office, but fails to realise he himself is the conduit for their commute back to his family. In short, he ends up making a worst-case example for why it’s a bad idea bringing stresses home from work. The minute he begins questioning the faithfulness of his family, he undercuts any level of mutual trust the family members previously enjoyed, dragging them down to a primitive-minded suspicion and subsequent violent dysfunctionality. In fact, this corrosive distrust is so prevalent that before long the audience is experiencing similar trust issues. Which of the characters can we trust? How can we, the audience, presume to vouch for characters we have spent only 30 minutes knowing? Our instinct to demonise and idolise characters is shattered and betrayed as we are forced to question the trustworthiness of each character. Life is not so simple. Cue the slow-burning rug pull of a realization that the characters we are watching are none other than ourselves. Through our implication in the trust games waged on screen, we are them; through our shared humanity, our shared subjectivity, the viewers experience sameness with those characters presented in the film. It is this relational, psychological, and moral dimension that the story draws its strength.
This is a film that is all about the integrity of the human person. It never blames incidents of our existence for evil. Rather, it rightly blames persons. It is of note that the primary Macguffin throughout the film’s tense duration is the handgun Iman brings home - “to protect us” – and stores in a drawer by his bedside table. Nowhere is there any insinuation that the weapon is inherently evil; rather, when Najmeh weighs it in her hands, she says “it is heavy”, as if referring rather to the responsibility that accompanies its bestowal than to the gun itself. Again, a testament to Rasoulof’s keen comprehension of, and focus on, the exclusively human origin of evil in our world: He does not blame material objects that are faultless, but persons who are anything but so. This exoneration of neutral objects is extended to technology, which plays a very significant role in the movie. When Iman subjects his family to humiliating videoed interviews, it reads as an unhinged exaltation of technology: Iman seems to believe the camera cannot lie, even if his family does. Meanwhile the viewers know that a human analysis of a human expression is no more discerning when it is carried out through a viewfinder, as when it is carried out face-to-face.
The sisters Rezvan and Sana are drawn along a divergent path from their parents practically from the outset, and the means for this is technology. As young women across the nation lead the charge against their repressive, patriarchally-wired state, taking to the streets to peacefully protest against the current government, the two sisters are exposed to a narrative that contradicts the television whose daily proclamations their parents so insistently claim to be dogma. Branding the film as unmistakably a creature of the Twitter-become-X era, the girls become hooked on the alternative media offered on their smartphones – media that depicts police brutality and street skirmishes without censorship. Without censorship, though not without intention. The way in which media represents viewpoints both implicitly and explicitly, the manner in which a ten-second clip can spark civil unrest and become the rallying cry for unquestionable rhetoric justifying untold violence, is obvious. The reliability of anonymous narrators who are incensed, and who are busy incensing others, is highlighted as dubious. In our world, we know that the path most followed is rarely the best – but does that crown the counter-narrative infallible by default? Of course, as “Sacred Fig” reminds us, it is seldom so simple.
As the sisters gaze, horrified and yet unable to look away, hunched together - a human triangle illuminated by the dour blue-white light of a phone, we are similarly fascinated and repulsed by the images of women attacked in the streets, by the broken bodies lying in the way. Mounds of photographic evidence pile up, cramming full the ledger of authoritarian abuse; the horror filling every crevice of their minds and hearts, defying belief, strangling pre-conceived notions, and extending the imperceptible fingers of anxiety across their hearts. Such a sensation is felt by those of us today who witness the bloody scenes seep out from wartorn Ukraine, from Israel and Gaza, from Iraq? We clamour for the right to see all, for transparency, but feel nauseous at the sight of blood, shaken to our core by images no person should have to see. And so the meta framing which compels us to relate to the characters is weaponized again – we gain a heightened sense of self-awareness as we slump in our plush cinema seats – witnesses to inhumane acts we cannot hope to resist save in spirit; the sisters do the same.
It is testimony to a tight grip on a cohesive narrative that the ponderous 2 hours and 47 minutes never tax the viewer. The third act is somewhat alienating, since to deliver the moral of the story, the crushing inevitability of justice must play out with the necessity of the Furies’ retribution. This translates to a couple of final sequences that seem concerned no longer with character arcs, as though fate has sealed off the chance to repent. This gloomy finish leaves the viewer pessimistic and deflated. It forces us to ask the question: how do we identify the seed of the sacred fig? Is it the small acts of resistance? The struggle for life, for purity, for truth? “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is all about sowing seeds for eternity through truth-telling, even if that means suffering for this same truth in our mortal realm below meanwhile.
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