'A Transformation of Anger into Beauty': Mohammad Rasoulof on The Seed of the Sacred Fig and Life After Leaving Iran

Two decades after screening his debut feature The Twilight (Gagooman) in Locarno in 2003, renowned Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof returns to the festival, presenting his latest opus The Seed of the Sacred Fig on the Piazza Grande.

Mohammad Rasoulof returns to Locarno with a heavy heart, as the dissident auteur recently chose to flee his native Iran to escape an eight-year prison sentence for “intention of committing a crime against the country’s security”. The grave decision bookmarks the director’s long and arduous journey to make films within the borders of the totalitarian regime of Iran, which had already barred Rasoulof from picking up a camera in 2011, when his Goodbye (Be omid-e didar) screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. That film, about an attorney whose license is revoked by the government, was a cunning metaphor for the way Iranian artists had been forced into silence and compliance. Like fellow dissidents such as Jafar Panahi, Rasoulof nonetheless managed to work around those constraints to make some of the most significant works of contemporary Iranian cinema. Shrouded in secrecy and shot clandestinely with fake permits, his next films went straight for the jugular of the country’s authoritarian society.

Take for instance Manuscripts Don't Burn (Dast-Neveshtehaa Nemisoozand, 2013), an ice-cold thriller that documents the regime’s failed attempts to liquidate dissenting Iranian writers, in which Rasoulof’s rage and melancholy feel almost palpable. Its 2017 successor,  A Man of Integrity (Lerd), is possibly more expressive still — a piercing condemnation of the country’s rampant corruption that’s hauntingly brought to life by lead actor Reza Akhlaghirad. That film resulted in grave consequences for Rasoulof; it earned him a travel ban and a one-year prison sentence which the director served in 2019. Instead of bowing down after these experiences, however, he went on to deliver one of his most powerful films to date, the 2020 Golden Bear-winner There Is No Evil (Sheytân vojūd nadârad), an inquisitive mosaic-film exploring the moral dilemmas surrounding capital punishment in Iran.

If There Is No Evil — which Rasoulof has claimed was based on his own experiences — is steeped in melancholic introspection, The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Daneh Anjeer Moghadas) is his expression of unbridled anger and desperation. Informed by the 2022 protests over the murder of Mahsa Amini, killed while in police custody for opposing the mandatory hijab, Rasoulof’s latest shows how the propulsive power of public dissent clashes with the rigid structures of the regime. He grafts this feud onto a small family unit, where the father, a government official, sees his power and control over his two daughters dwindle. In the hands of Rasoulof, this family drama turns into a scorching thriller that sponges all the fury and anguish that are now bubbling up to the surface of Iran’s society.

Prior to his arrival in Locarno, the Iranian filmmaker spoke with Pardo from an undisclosed location in Germany about his work, life, and hopes for the future.

Hugo Emmerzael: Your fateful escape from Iran immediately after your sentence, and your subsequent arrival in Cannes, made a big impact in the film world. That was some months ago already, so I have a very simple, yet difficult question: how are you doing now?

Mohammad Rasoulof: That’s not an easy question for me to answer. I feel like it will be a long process to figure that out, as many things are still ongoing. I feel that everything is remote, and I feel a bit lost in trying to measure all what has happened. I will probably need much more time and distance to digest the entire process. What I do feel now, is happiness and gratitude that I was able to finish this film. At the same time, I am worried and feel sad about my friends and collaborators, who are still in a difficult situation. I carry these mixed feelings with me.

HE: Your presence in Cannes became the talk of the town, putting your film also into the limelight. I can imagine this attracted a lot of attention on you and your collaborators within Iran. How did the huge exposure in Cannes inform reactions in your home country

MR: As soon as the news of the Cannes selection was made public, there already was a lot of pressure on all my collaborators in the cast and crew. The government knew who had taken part in the film and put them under pressure. My cinematographer, for instance, had his office attacked. They also interrogated all the members of the cast and crew, pressuring them to ask me to withdraw the film from Cannes. Of course, my collaborators refused this. The strongest pressure, however, we experienced when we already were in Cannes. These were difficult days, in which they tried everything they could to make us withdraw the film. There was an investigation that was launched against all of us, and against all of those who have stayed in Iran. Luckily, that's behind us now. And for now, we're just waiting. We don't know yet when the trial is going to be, and what's going to be the next step of this procedure against the film crew.

HE: Those (and past) experiences must have been very painful and infuriating. How much of those emotions do you allow to become part of your creative process? Would you say you embrace them, or do you try to keep them at bay while you make your films?

MR: I definitely have a lot of anger in me, alongside sadness and despair. These are probably traumas that not only stem from my personal experiences as a filmmaker, but also from the society I live in. I'm sure that there are inner wounds, not only for me, but for all Iranian artists who work under these circumstances. However, I have always tried to transform this anger into beauty - to describe, to observe, and to share the beauty that I also see in the Iranian landscapes and human beings. That's what I can hold on to. My state of mind and my way of creation have always been geared towards resolving things, opening up on a personal level, and hopefully sharing those feelings with my audience. So, I think the best way I can try and describe my creative process would be as a transformation of anger into beauty.

HE: I'm happy that you mentioned the Iranian landscapes, because natural surroundings play a strong role in your cinema. You could even call them additional characters or storylines in your films. In Manuscripts Don't Burn, A Man of Integrity, and There Is No Evil, they all carry a symbolic meaning. How do you see this relationship between the natural environments and your films?

MR: First of all, I have a very personal, deep and strong relationship with nature and wilderness. Those are the places where I can feel serenity. I try to go to nature as often as I can, even when I work on my films — during writing and when I'm thinking about directing, all these moments I like to spend in nature rather than in an urban environment. At the same time, I'm really keen on showing the beauty of my country in my films. I must say that going away from the city is also a way for me to remain hidden from censorship and to escape surveillance. This is something that always happens in my films, too. All those you mentioned start in the city, and escape it, heading towards nature. We have to run away from the city, towards places where it’s easier to work.

HE: In the case of The Seed of the Sacred Fig the landscape seems to be even more loaded with symbolic significance, especially during the intense finale where characters literally get lost in their ruinous surroundings.

MR: For me, this special natural site is a metaphor of Iran. You have all this beauty, but it’s also in ruins.

HE: It seems to me that you have gradually allowed allegories and metaphors to become stronger aspects of your cinema, while also maintaining a relentless form of realism. How do you see that interplay between realism and metaphor?

MR: In the very first films I made, I had this tendency of choosing a metaphorical language, in order to avoid the confrontation with the censor. It was a way to prevent all the repression that I would have felt while making films and art. I also saw it as a return to the tradition of Persian literature and poetry, in which metaphor and allegory are really the essence of expression. So, I found it simultaneously quite convenient and convincing. However, I gradually started to realize that this metaphorical language was also a way of giving in to the censorship, a way of not explicitly referring to any subject that could irritate the powers at play. So, I began to realize that it was important to become more straightforward, to confront and tackle more directly my environment and the subjects that I could observe and be a witness of. That’s what I did around the midway point of my career. The films I made then were cruder in the way they depicted situations. It's only in this third and more recent phase of my oeuvre that my films reach a combination between these two aspects, dealing with stories in both a straightforward and more allegorical or metaphorical way. I think that The Seed of the Sacred Fig is the film in which I managed to combine those elements most successfully. It really shows I was a witness to what is going on in my society, while all the added layers require interpretation from the audience.

HE: The word “confrontation” seems to be very important here, as many of your films are about the dilemma between obeying or disobeying orders from the state, or about the choice between confronting and surrendering. With The Seed of the Sacred Fig, you transpose this societal dilemma to a family unit, where a father gives in to the regime, while his daughters try to rebel and dissent. How does this smaller familial story become, for you, the story of the entirety of Iran?

MR: I think there are some interests, questions, or even obsessions that really circulate from one film to the other, without me consciously wanting to go back to them or to develop them further. They just manifest in different forms. I’m always trying to understand this totalitarian system. At first, I tried to understand its mechanics: how can these systems survive and work? Then, gradually, I started to become more curious about the individuals that make them function. What makes these people take part in them? What are their social backgrounds? What are their psychological specificities? What are their paths? From my own personal experience, I met with so many judges, prison guards, interrogators, and inspectors that I started to get to know these people. Which doesn’t result in answers – I don’t think we will ever have full answers – but it does give some hints, some bits and pieces of explanations. I try to build my scripts and my characters according to these observations. In The Seed of the Sacred Fig, this is manifested in the way this system of indoctrination seeps into the family structure. It shows how this system relies on expecting that somebody else will think for you, and transmit their opinions to you. That works in a chain: you receive your beliefs and ideas from above, and then you expect the person below you to also behave in the same way. So, there’s this brainwash, something that you transmit from one level to the other. One scene in the film shows that in an explicit manner, when the husband is praying and his wife is behind him, just repeating the same gestures, without questioning, without having any personal part in it. It’s just repeating and reproducing the same discourse, the same beliefs and the same gestures. This is the structure that I'm interested in.

HE: Before your studies in filmmaking, you studied sociology. Isn’t it somewhat ironic that that through the work that you did as a filmmaker, resulting in many confrontations with the regime, you've got an almost sociological overview of all these different layers of the Iranian bureaucracy and state? Aren’t you, accidentally perhaps, a sociological filmmaker of the manifestations and inner-mechanics of this system that is repressing its citizens?

MR: I wouldn't say so, because sociology is a science, and I don't claim to give any scientific or objective depiction of a situation within my films. Maybe all we can say is that my films deliver an honest view of some parts of Iranian society.

HE: The two daughters in The Seed of the Sacred Fig become a symbol for a new generation of demonstrators and activists that since 2022 have been the face of Iranian dissent. In the film, you show the immediacy through which they process all that is happening in society, obviously through social media feeds and live video streams. There is an interesting tension there, because these developments come in rapid succession and are captured in real time. Meanwhile, your film took years to make, and still has to evoke all this immediacy. How would you describe the relationship between this reflexive aspect of cinema, and the immediacy of what is happening in society?

MR: When you are in a totalitarian system, every conflict puts you in front of a moral dilemma. It's very often that you are faced with questions and restrictions that force you to make a choice. Those choices are always based on moral priorities. This gets at the different layers at play at the same time, because you have the immediacy of this choice, and then the deeper layers that inform the morality on which you base your decisions. I can give you a very specific example of this from the film. When the mother is confronted with her daughters’ wounded friend, she is extremely impressed. You feel she wants to help this girl, but as soon as she recovers from her initial emotional reaction, she realizes that she also has her own family to look after. So, instead of saving or helping this girl, she decides to preserve her family. A similar thing happens to the father, who, at the beginning, has issues with signing these death sentence requests. He initially resists, but soon enough is convinced, because he's brainwashed and follows doctrine. These dilemmas get at this different level of time, and show the depth of the choices that characters have to make.

HE: Iranian directors like Jafar Panahi and you are known for being mentors or teachers to younger generations of artists and filmmakers. With all the major events happening in your private life and in Iranian society at large, would you say that the lessons or wisdom you want to pass on to a new generation have changed? Or does the message always stay the same, despite the changing circumstances?

MR: I have a problem with the first part of your question, which is presenting me as a model or somebody who has any advice to give. I always see myself as a learner, as somebody who tries to experiment and doesn’t want to feel constrained by some principles or rules that are given to me. What I will add is that I have noticed that totalitarian systems, especially Iran’s, always try to convince the younger generations of artists that politics are useless and of no interest; that art should not mix with politics because art works on a higher level. They say it would be a waste of art to tackle politics. This is something that I have always been careful about – the more totalitarian the system, the more everything turns into politics. Any choice, even the choice of silence, becomes a way of embracing censorship and allowing them to seize power. So, the only concern I have now is that I wish the situation was not so suffocating, that there wasn't so much pressure on us, that I could choose my subjects or my approach in a freer way.

HE: It reminds me of a man in your documentary Head Wind (Baad-e-daboor, 2008), who says: “trying in vain is much better than apathy.” Isn’t that secretly the philosophy of your entire body of work?

MR: Exactly. All the more so because I made that documentary between two other films. At the time I really wanted to stick to the system in which I was working, trying to get the proper permits to do my work. After my first film, however, it was so difficult to receive a permit for a second. So, I figured I’d make a documentary in between. That second permit was never delivered though, meaning I had to completely change my way of working. So, yes, trying in vain is what I've been doing forever, and it's a good definition of my past.

HE: If I may ask about the uncertain future: both you and Iran have been through a lot in the past couple of years. What are your hopes or concerns for what’s to come?

MR: There is a personal level and a general level to this question. On a personal level, sometimes one looks back and feels sorry that life is so short. At the same time, scientists say that there are many more galaxies in the universe, and that we live in just a tiny piece of space. When you look at this, you feel just how absurd one life can be. And yet, in this period that you are given to live, I think it's very important to try to be your best self. For me, what is priceless is freedom and the quest for it. What I consider the most important evolution in life, especially in Iran, is a cultural evolution, and cultural change is what is really at stake and what is necessary in my country. So, I try to contribute to this, to have a cultural impact. That's the best I can do with the life that I have been given. That means I don’t think at too large a scale, and try not to feel desperate because my goals are unreachable. I rather think: what I can do in my own scale to contribute to our quest for freedom and cultural change?