THE SAFETY’S OFF

The Seed of the Sacred Fig 🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱 5 Maryellens

This chilling film starts with a man counting bullets. Iman (Missagh Zareh) has been promoted to be an investigating judge in Iran’s Revolutionary Courts, and, in addition to a bigger apartment, his new job apparently comes with a gun. He regards the weapon with some hesitation and tucks it away, out of sight from his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), and daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki).

Shortly after, Mahsa Amini dies in police custody, and the country explodes. Day by day, the newly radicalized Rezvan and Sana grow bolder and bolder, and their parents, used to keeping their heads down and terrified of losing their hard-won advancement, grow more and more anxious. The cast is outstanding, especially Golestani as Najmeh, who finds her sense of normalcy slipping away. When tempers flare after a friend of the girls is badly wounded at a protest, she realizes she’s trapped, trying to broker peace between her husband and her children.

Things only get worse when the gun goes missing.

Writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof filmed The Seed of the Sacred Fig in secret in Tehran over 70 days beginning in December 2023, then smuggled the footage to editor Andrew Bird in Germany. This secrecy gives the film a suitably chilly, claustrophobic vibe. Everything important happens behind closed doors, most information is passed in whispers.

The girls, as most young Iranians did in those turbulent months, are living on their phones anyway. And for their small screens, Bird cut in actual video of women protesting and burning their hijabs in the fall of 2022. (Seed was one of several films at the New York Film Festival this year to incorporate documentary evidence into the narrative.)

This one small family emerges as a stand-in for a whole country coming apart. And for Rasoulof, the story’s end is all but certain—when Seed was chosen for the Cannes Film Festival, he fled Iran on foot, beginning a 28-day journey to Germany to avoid flogging and eight years in prison. We often describe artists as courageous, for looking at characters on the margins of society, for making brave stylistic or dramaturgical choices. Rasoulof though is a true profile in courage. He and his crew risked their lives to make this brilliant, dangerous film.

A version of this review appeared in Bloomberg Pursuits on Oct. 19.