“The story is very close to reality,” says Mohammad Rasoulof, the vocal director of The Seed of the Sacred Fig. This film comes at a time of unrest in Iran. The director made the film after fleeing the country, where he had received an eight-year prison sentence and flogging. Rasoulof has been an avid opponent of the Iranian regime and has used cinema as his medium of rebellion. A Man of Integrity (2017) and There Is No Evil (2020) are both critical of the Islamic regime, the latter winning The Golden Bear in Berlin.

His newest film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, centers around an Iranian family, where the patriarch, Iman (Misagh Zare) has just been promoted to investigative judge. His job requires him to interrogate youth who have been detained for protesting and sign off on death sentences, often without reading the files. His wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), is in support of the new role as it will allow the family to move to a bigger, better-located apartment where her daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), will have their own rooms. To complicate things, with Iman‘s new job, he is given a pistol for “protection“. But when it goes missing, tensions rise because its absence could bring a fine and as much as a three-year prison sentence for Iman. 

But who took it? Could it have been Safdaf (Niousha Akhshi), an outspoken friend of Rezvan who visited the house after getting hit in the face with buckshot during a protest? Even darker, could have been one of his family members? As Iman becomes increasingly paranoid about the missing gun, the plot spirals into a domestic thriller. His desperate search for the weapon leads to a harrowing blindfolded interrogation of his own family, revealing deep-seated mistrust and fear. His suspicion and anger reach a boiling point when he relocates his family to his remote childhood home, resorting to extreme measures to uncover the truth.