A standing ovation at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where the movie competed for the Palme d’Or, for The Seed of The Sacred Fig was an emotional reception for a movie whose director, Mohammad Rasoulof, had just fled Iran and successfully escaped persecution – and a sentence of up to eight years in prison.
It is against this backdrop of theocratic tyranny that Rasoulof made The Sacred Fig, an emotional, tense drama set amidst Iran’s politically charged landscape.
A the center of the movie is the conflict between Iman (Misagh Zare), the father of the family and a state prosecutor, and his supportive wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), on one hand, and their daughters, university-age Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and younger Sana (Setareh Maleki), on the other. The daughters, whose views of the Iranian regime and, by extension, their father’s work, clash with their elders’ staunch conservativism, forms much of the movie’s conflict. The generational clash which pits the pro-democratic daughters against their hardline parents does so within the context of an otherwise loving family. It is here where The Sacred Fig is at its most powerful and gut-wrenching.
The movie earned a rapturous 12-minute standing ovation after its premiere at Cannes, after which Rasoulof said in a press conference, “We’re gangsters of cinema,” before adding, “My heart is with the actors and the members of the team who can’t be with us, I think about them all the time. I hope that the restrictions they’re encountering will be lifted.”
The Seed of the Sacred Fig will be released in France on 18 September 2024, and in the USA later this year via Neon.
