Mohammad Rasoulof: Prison, politics and his Oscar-nominated film

Mohammad Rasoulof is tired. He’s exhausted. The venerated Iranian filmmaker tells me so (via a delightful translator called Iante) on a Tuesday afternoon at the end of January at The Soho Hotel in London.  

Mohammad is in town to promote The Seed of the Sacred Fig, his latest feature film to grapple with the corruption and brutality within the Islamic Republic of Iran, eight months after it premiered to acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival.

Since then he’s travelled the world to screen the politically potent familial drama, earning both BAFTA and Oscar nominations along the way, which somewhat explains his fatigue.  

Still, as much as he relaxes into our conversation, reclining back into the hotel sofa and making jokes here and there, a weariness hangs over him; for there is one country he is not allowed to show this film in – his own.  

Mohammad is one of several high-profile Iranian filmmakers to be arrested, censored and condemned by the Iranian regime for his art — both 2017’s A Man of Integrity and 2020’s There Is No Evil use grounded human stories to critique the government at large.

It was in July 2022 that he was taken into custody by the Iranian Revolutionary Court.  There he was placed in solitary confinement for five weeks while investigators built a case against him, accusing him of “propaganda against the system” via his films and public speaking.

After he was put into the general section of the prison, doing time for previous convictions, the idea for his latest film came to him. 

Drawing inspiration from the prison officials he met in lock-up and the 2022 Woman Life Freedom protests that were going on outside, Mohammad conceived a character study centred on a single household based in Tehran.  

Headed by Iman (Missagh Zareh), a devout government official newly promoted to a judgeship, he faces a crisis of faith, professional duty and family as the mass feminist protests – stemming from the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the country’s morality police for not wearing her hijab correctly – infiltrates the home he shares with his loyal housewife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and two increasingly rebellious daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki).  

Made entirely in secret over five months during the first half of 2024 – following the filmmaker’s release from prison for health reasons, and getting a temporary pardon – the film is a powderkeg of a drama, excavating Iran’s past, present and oppressive patriarchy. It also secured his exile from Iran.  

Refusing to withdraw the film from Cannes, Mohammad was sentenced to eight years in prison as well as flogging, a fine, confiscation of his property and a continued ban from filmmaking.

He defiantly fled the country, and while he might miss his home, his friends, and his culture, he wouldn’t do anything different.

“Disobeying censorship, resisting it, and standing up for your rights, gives you the sense that you are rebuilding yourself,” he tells The New Arab.

“You’re taking back your self-respect, the dignity that is constantly being eroded, constantly being destroyed.” 

Here, the director discusses the challenges of making The Seed of the Sacred Fig, his career and the power of cinema. 

Hanna Flint for The New Arab: My first question is, how are you feeling? 

Mohammad Rasoulouf: To tell the truth, I just want to have a nap. I’d love to make a film where once you’ve done it, it just goes and does its job without you having to accompany it! 

You sound exactly like David Lynch. He’d say something like, “When I make a film, everyone wants to talk about it, but the film is the talking.”  

[Laughing] Well, of course, you have to accompany the film and support it in any way, so I’m very happy to do that. Apart from the professional and artistic satisfaction I get from the success and the audiences that the film is talking to, what is most important is that the team, my exceptional cast and crew, can see the result of all the hard work and the risks they took. 

It is unbelievable to think that having filmed in such harsh circumstances and with such limited equipment, the film could then go on such a journey.  

I’m curious, if you could speak with the filmmaker you were when you made your first film, what would you tell him? 

Go and get a job! No, I’d tell him I’m really happy with the path I’ve undertaken. It’s been difficult. I’ve been so alone. I’ve made eight films. Not one of them has been shown in a cinema in Iran.

The film I made five years ago, There Is No Evil, I only saw it very recently in a cinema for the first time. I’d seen it before, but I’d never seen it on a big screen.  

It’s what I find interesting about your films, and certainly, when it comes to systemic corruption, it’s not unique to Iran. Nor an apathy in the world that has led to these terrible circumstances. Do you think cinema has the power to turn the apathetic into the active? 

Absolutely. As we speak, I’m thinking about the fact that cinema has done that to me, that cinema has had that influence on me and has brought me onto the path that I currently am pursuing.  

Whereas a big part of cinema is entertainment, I think cinema can be about ideas. It can be about questions. It can make us question everything we know, all the things we think we know.

Even through characters, even through stories that can make us constantly re-question everything that we take for granted, everything we think we’ve already questioned. 

I agree. So the opening statement of the film informs the audience that it was made in secret. Could you discuss those challenges? 

Every time you want to make an underground film, you have to find a new way because the way you’ve used it before, or other people have used it before, will have become known, and therefore it becomes much riskier.  

The way I operate is not dissimilar to the way that gangsters do but I think I could be defined as a cultural gangster. It was a very testing process. Difficult. I couldn’t stand it. But most of the time when it was working successfully, I communicated with two main assistants on set; one in charge of the more technical side and the other the more artistic side.  

Of course, my entire cast and crew were very special in the sense that they were all extremely committed, on a personal level, to find ways of finding artistic freedom within these very adverse circumstances. They shortened as much as possible the physical distance between us using their amazing creativity. 

So speaking of the script, how much did that evolve from the first draft to the shooting script? 

Making an underground film requires two very different aspects. On the one hand, you need an extremely precise script that will take account of all the risks and be done in such a way that everything can be shot without people getting arrested. And yet, at the same time, this enormous flexibility that if circumstances were to change, you can adapt and still shoot something that will work. It’s almost like having pieces of iron attached with silicon; so very hard and fixed matter right next to this very soft and adaptable matter.  

There is one scene in particular, which to me, was absolutely crucial but we couldn’t film it. It would have destroyed everything and nullified all of our efforts. It is a huge regret and a source of great dissatisfaction knowing that I was not able to shoot it. But when I watch the film, I see all of those silicon scenes that, thank God, we were able to shoot and be flexible, otherwise there would be no film.  

What was the scene? 

A scene of Iman at work, praying together with his colleagues, which is a sort of tradition in the Iranian judiciary, in which he says this one verse in Arabic from the Quran: “I am submitted to the essence or the one you are submitted to and I will fight beside you until the day of judgment.”  

Filming it as I would have wanted to seemed impossible. We all thought it would certainly lead to our arrest. So instead, we have that sentence in the film, in the scene where Iman is praying together with Najmir at dawn and that is his turning point in terms of his character arc. He convinces himself that he’s following his religious ideology, but he’s actually following his profession, his personal gains.  

It had to do with my experience in prison, where I often heard the guards and other prison officials praying together, weeping together, and saying, among other prayers, that one verse. That’s where they derived a lot of their power, certitude, and strength to go on. 

I love that your films show the humanity behind the people committing corruption, the agents of the regime. Why is it so important for your characters to be written that way? 

All these characters are based on close encounters I’ve had with regime operatives over many years, ranging from interrogators to people in censorship, judges, prosecutors and so on. Perhaps the one common factor I found that distinguishes them from most other human beings is that when it comes to questioning or thinking about their agency and responsibility within a machine of oppression, they don’t think about it.  

I’m certainly not trying to say that they’re all good people, however, what I can say is that I did meet all these human beings who have all these wonderful human qualities and yet also have these pretty scary qualities. When those take over, the human qualities seem to become interrupted. 

Could you talk to me about the significance of the final location in the cave dwellings, away from the city of Tehran? 

The place is called Kharanaq near Yazd in the central Iranian desert. What mattered to me was that it had this shrine next to it. You’ve got religion overshadowing this history and projecting this shade of ignorance upon the history of Iran. I could project the story of his family onto this backdrop, honouring history and looking at the intersection between patriarchy, tradition and modern Iran, the battle for women’s rights, the chase between men and women and the chase for women’s rights throughout history.  

But also it’s a warning, in a way that, yes, patriarchy might sort of collapse within its own tomb, but it can come up again and take the weapon that’s right next to it. The struggle between tradition and modernity has been ongoing for at least the last 150 years of Iranian history. It’s a big battle still unfolding. 

And the songs Sana (Setareh Maleki) plays at the end. Can you tell me about them? 

The room that Sana is in is this old storage room, which is a bit like a container that symbolises Iran’s cultural history. We see, for instance, in those pictures, not just Islam, but 12 Imams of Iranian Shiasm. We also hear the voices of women singers, which, of course, have been banned since the 1979 revolution. But just because they’ve been erased and banned, it does not mean they’re not there. 

That’s beautiful. My final question: if you could go back to Iran, and visit your favourite cinema, what film would you choose to watch? 

There’s a 2013 film called Europa Report, about this shuttle which is sent out into space on an astronomical mission. There’s a scene in which one of the film’s protagonists leaves the spaceship to help one of his colleagues but he becomes polluted. Were he to return to the spaceship, he would kill everyone. So he decides not to and we see him floating away. 

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is in UK cinemas now

Hanna Flint is a British-Tunisian critic, broadcaster and author of Strong Female Character: What Movies Teach Us. Her reviews, interviews and features have appeared in GQ, the Guardian, Elle, Town & Country, Mashable, Radio Times, MTV, Time Out, The New Arab, Empire, BBC Culture and elsewhere

Follow her on Instagram: @hannainesflint

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