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Iman, a judge in Tehran, suspects his family as protests escalate and his gun goes missing.
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Why watch this film?
Chief Editor at Filmelier
Shot entirely in secret, Mohammad Rasoulof’s award-winning thriller, "The Seed of the Sacred Fig", centers on a family thrust into the public eye when Iman is appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran. As political unrest erupts in the streets, Iman realizes that his job is even more dangerous than expected, making him increasingly paranoid and distrustful, even of his own wife and daughters.
"The Seed of the Sacred Fig, awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for the 2025 Oscars for Best International Film, is a movie by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, who has faced several attempts at censorship by the Iranian regime. He had to film this production in secret and flee the country to present it. Set against the backdrop of the protests following the death of Mahsa Amini, which triggered a wave of repression and violence between 2022 and 2023 comparable only to the Iranian Revolution, the film explores the lives of a family. The father, Iman (Missagh Zareh), is appointed as an investigative judge for the Tehran Revolutionary Court, but only with the purpose of issuing sentences obediently—often death sentences—without reviewing evidence. He decides to keep the job as a way to provide a better life for his wife (Soheila Golestani) and two daughters (Setareh Maleki and Mahsa Rostami), but tensions at home escalate as protests intensify on the streets, the girls align with the demonstrators, and the father’s weapon mysteriously disappears from the house. Rasoulof makes the most of the few locations he could film in, turning the domestic space into a suffocating place where the family’s core coexists inseparably with politics and is inevitably corrupted by fundamentalism and authoritarianism. A brilliant and intelligent film that, beyond its Iranian context, shows us that the naivety of separating family from politics is impossible, as one is the seed of the other, in symbiosis."