The Seed of the Sacred Fig director Mohammad Rasoulof on navigating Iran’s minefields

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The mountainous regions of Iran are older than us and have seen far too much. Long before modern borders drew its current shape, changing empires tapped it for many tasks: carving out trade routes, fortifying defences and hosting both loud and quiet crossings.

When director Mohammad Rasoulof found himself bound to the terrain in 2010, navigating the divide between his homeland and an escape to the unknown, Iran still followed. “I remember having set off with very small hope and I really had no belief that we would be able to make it,” Rasoulof recalls, sinking into a worn office chair, his arm draped casually over the backrest. “And so, in a way, it’s the small nuggets of hope over the years that transformed into something much bigger than I could imagine.”

Rasoulof’s hair, grey and close-cropped, sits neatly against his crown, tracing the natural shape of his profile. His face is bare and unadorned, slightly aged, and composed; his demeanour a mix of pensiveness and relief. Having been graced with a 12-minute standing ovation at Cannes last year, his ninth feature film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is ready for a general, public embrace.

“What I wanted most to show in this film is not just a story about survival, but a story about the search for dignity,” he adds, his eyes drifting past the room at Elevation Pictures, the Canadian film distributor’s downtown Toronto office, weighing each word before the release. “Even in the most oppressive circumstances, people find ways to hold onto their humanity. That’s the thread that runs through everything in the film – the resistance, the silence, and even the smallest acts of kindness.”

Sacred Fig is fundamentally a film about bonds fractured by perspective. Set during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, it draws the upheaval of the streets into the quiet tension of a family home. As protests followed Mahsa Amini’s death in September 2022 after her arrest for allegedly not complying with hijab laws, Iman (Missagh Zareh) – both father and newly promoted investigator – tightens his grip on his household. His supportive wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), contends with his growing authority while their daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), watch in quiet resistance as events unfold on their phones.

Family exchanges about Iman’s missing firearm later serve to connect the defiance unfolding in the streets to the simmering tensions within the family. Even the gestures themselves – a brush of the cheek, hands sharing bread, food being spread, eyes glancing, meat and bones tearing – all imbue Sacred Fig with the kind of nuance that comes with resisting one’s government.

“It was very important to show the human facets of someone like the father, who complies and is complicit in the actions of a regime,” says Rasoulof, who notes that in dark rooms, he has faced interrogations from people like him. “Not to say they’re not monsters, but because their humanity takes on greater importance when you put it in the context of their choices. They could choose to be good people, but they don’t.”

If there’s a common thread in Rasoulof’s films, so often interrogating government-sanctioned wrongs, it’s the sacramental truth embedded within the art of cinema: Life imitates art.

After all, his synchronicity with the theme of resistance is absolute. Rasoulof himself was never supposed to leave home. That part took him time – Tehran was of course the aroma of fresh-baked barbari carried on the breeze toward rooftop terraces that acted as sanctuaries for hushed, unguarded dialogue.

But twice, Rasoulof – as one of the country’s foremost filmmakers – came to know the cold confines of Iranian cells. In 2010, he was jailed while filming an unfinished project about the Green Movement protests. A decade later, his drama A Man of Integrity, about the cost of virtue in a corrupt society, brought another sentence for “collusion and propaganda.” By 2022, prison was a familiar price. He served seven months that year for signing a petition critical of the government – defiance as instinctive as his filmmaking.

“I sometimes drown in the film when I re-watch it because it reminds me of what I was not able to be on the streets,” says Rasoulof, who began work on Sacred Fig in a tense time in Tehran after he left prison, relying on intermediaries to discreetly assemble a trusted cast and crew without revealing his involvement – a hallmark of the guerrilla filmmaking techniques he has long employed to bypass censorship.

”My inability to attend protests, take part or see what was happening because I was behind bars – it feels like a past I was not allowed to be a part of.”

Rasoulof further articulates this feeling in the context of secretly filming Sacred Fig: raids, travel bans, work prohibitions and days-long interrogations. By its end, his crew faced prosecution on charges of corruption, propaganda and threats to national security, with some already detained or tried.

It’s a system that he continues to feel his way through, resulting in moments that blend pride, activism and extended grief in equal measure – a season-long ceremony of celebrated stress. With each film, Rasoulof understands he’s leaving a country behind, potentially adding years to a sentence that will keep him away from a place he wants to better. For now, Rasoulof lives in exile, his home a memory, as he finds himself residing in Germany.

When asked how he continues to navigate this minefield of artistic expression and what it would mean to lose the medium he so loves, Rasoulof smiles.

“It does represent a philosophical question for me, what would it mean to no longer have the thing that gives meaning to life,” adds Rasoulof, before again pausing. “I guess my job for now is to truly neutralize the landmines themselves.”

The Seed of the Sacred Fig opens in select Canadian theatres Jan. 10.

Special to The Globe and Mail