Shortly before The Seed of the Sacred Fig premièred in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize, and well before it became Germany’s entry for Best International Feature at this year’s Academy Awards, Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison, plus a flogging and a hefty fine, for ‘collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the security of the country’. Rasoulof only made it to Cannes after fleeing Iran on foot, embarking on a treacherous twenty-eight-day trek to the safety of Germany, where another member of his crew had been able to smuggle hard drives laden with the footage from their secretive four-month shoot.

This wasn’t the first time the fifty-two-year-old’s dissident filmmaking had rubbed the regime the wrong way. He was previously imprisoned, had his passport revoked, and was banned from leaving Iran because of supposed ‘propaganda against the system’. It is easy to see why The Seed of the Sacred Fig, even more than A Man of Integrity (2017) or There Is No Evil (2020), might get under the authorities’ skin: it is a surgical excoriation of life under theocratic rule, sweeping in scope yet ruthlessly detailed. If this is the last film Rasoulof is able to make in Iran, it is a perfect, culminating kiss-off to the regime he has spent his entire career critiquing.

Not unlike Macbeth, Sacred Fig begins with a promotion. Iman (Missagh Zareh) has been bumped up to the rank of investigator in the Revolutionary Court (the same policing body that has had Rasoulof in its sights for the past fifteen years). While many in his position go their entire careers without divulging the true nature of their work to their families for fear of vigilante reprisal, Iman’s wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) is keen for him to share the news with their young daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). This promotion means that their family is moving up in the world; soon they might be granted official housing (‘Will we finally be given a three-bedroom apartment?’ asks Najmeh), and they might even be able to afford a new dishwasher. It also means the girls must be ‘irreproachable’ in how they conduct themselves, whom they associate with, and what they say and do online.

Soheila Golestani as Najmeh, Mahsa Rostami as Rezvan, and Setareh Maleki as Sana

This is mere days before the true-to-life death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in police custody in 2022 after being arrested for not properly wearing a hijab, sparking some of the biggest protests in Tehran’s history (state media claimed that she died of a heart attack; eyewitnesses spoke of police brutality). These protests mean a full caseload for Iman, who is soon being asked to cut corners as he sorts through ‘100, 200, 300 cases a day’, signing off on death sentences without even reading the indictments. While at home, in the close-quarters, inner-city apartment where most of Sacred Fig’s drama unfolds, there is a growing divide between what Najmeh sees of the protests on state-sanctioned television and what her daughters see on social media (‘the hostile media’, as her parents call it). For this, Rasoulof uses deeply confronting real-life phone footage from the 2022 riots, interspersing it throughout the film as a counterpoint to the growing unrest in Iman and Najmeh’s home. It all comes to a head when Iman’s service pistol goes missing from his bedroom drawer, a potentially career-ending misstep. Chekhov’s gun, yes, but also a frightening reminder of how the regime’s perks – and protection – can be stripped away just as quickly as they are granted.

You wouldn’t guess that Sacred Fig was filmed mostly in secret, with Rasoulof frequently directing his actors via walkie-talkie from the boot of a car. The performances across the board are outstanding, none more so than that of Soheila Golestani, who carries the film on her shoulders, just as Najmeh carries her family on hers. Having devoted twenty years of her life to her husband – and by extension, to the republic – it’s heartbreaking to watch Najmeh navigate the increasingly impossible choice between civic and maternal duty, as she slowly comes to realise where her husband’s ultimate loyalties lie. For his part, Iman makes for a brilliantly conflicted antagonist, unable (or simply unwilling) to back away from the pact he made with his country, and his faith, so long ago. Rasoulof has spoken about how his run-ins with representatives of the Revolutionary Court over the years helped him develop the character of Iman. It is a testament to Rasoulof’s unwavering humanity that even Sacred Fig’s proxy for its director’s own would-be jailer is treated as a cursed hero rather than a cartoon villain.

Even the most hard-fisted regimes can’t have eyes and ears everywhere at all times. They rely on complicity at the community level, from co-workers and family members who believe that their fealty will be rewarded. In the same way revolution starts from the ground up, tyranny trickles down, and in this way, Sacred Fig frames authoritarianism not as a pre-defined state but as a slow, insidious creep. This symbolic parasitism springs from the titular ficus religiosa – a plant that strangles its host in order to thrive – and infects the film on a visual and symbolic level, just as Rasoulof sees his country’s theocracy as infecting its people’s way of life and colouring almost every human interaction. When your family becomes a direct extension of the state, and your father becomes a direct extension of God (he is named Iman, after all), even everyday household objects become either weapons of oppression or tools of liberation. The tweezers Rezvan and Sana use to innocently pluck their eyebrows are later repurposed to remove buckshot from a facial injury; the camcorder that captured memories of family holidays past is used to record an impromptu interrogation. As Sacred Fig barrels towards its thrilling final act, swapping the family’s claustrophobic apartment for desolate countryside, implied threats become manifest and symbols become literal, until we find the family fleeing through the ruins of an abandoned village, as though futilely seeking shelter in the hollowed-out remnants of Iranian tradition itself.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig joins an emerging pantheon of films from modern masters fearlessly embedding themselves on the wrong side of history, films like The Zone of Interest (2023) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) that ask what it takes for ostensibly decent people to willingly absolve themselves of any moral obligation to their fellow human beings. So far, the prevailing answer in all these films is simply that every man’s conscience has a price – the lower that price is, the more painful and prescient an indictment the film becomes. It could be a beautiful rose garden next to Auschwitz, or a native title in Oklahoma brimming with crude oil, but it might take as little as a three-bedroom apartment and a brand new dishwasher.