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Mohammad Rasoulof (director), The Seed of the Sacred Fig, 2024. 167 min.

The fig tree spreads by entwining itself around another, slowly constricting, siphoning its strength, until nothing remains but the fig itself. No metaphor could better encapsulate Iran’s theocracy—strangulation is the only word that fits. From the film’s opening frame, an eerie claustrophobia seeps through, manifesting in the measured, constrained movements of the characters and in the way the frame itself appears to shrink, suffocating the space it captures. Shot in secret, the film bears the weight of its own making, building inexorably towards a moment of crushing inevitability. But here’s the thing about the sacred fig—it may consume its host, but it cannot touch the roots beneath. The roots remain. Rasoulof, a director forced into exile for his, understands this better than anyone.

The film opens with the portrait of a family of four. At its centre is Iman (Misagh Zare), a man on the cusp of power, newly appointed as an investigating judge in Iran’s Revolutionary Court. His promotion promises a larger apartment, a heftier salary, and the cold steel of a government-issued firearm. His wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), devout and dutiful, offers her quiet support. Their daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), embody the existence of young women in a country that polices their every breath.

 Set against the incendiary backdrop of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022—ignited by the custodial murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini—the film unfolds with a slow-burning tension. Iman, initially resolute in his role, soon finds himself trapped in the machinery of state repression. The directives from above are clear: suppress dissent, sign the death sentences placed on his desk without hesitation. His superior, Ghaderi (Reza Akhlaghi), instructs Iman to authorise an execution without so much as glancing at the case file. But outside their apartment, the streets of Tehran pulse with rage and defiance. Rasoulof captures this moment as a filmmaker who knows firsthand the cost of resistance, weaving real protest footage into his narrative. He also exposes the Iranian state, seasoned in the art of propaganda, as it floods the media with misinformation regarding Amini’s death.

In an crucial scene, state television broadcasts the government’s manufactured version of events—protesters are “rioters,” “foreign agents,” “misguided fools.” But for Rezvan, the elder daughter, the facade is cracking. She asks her younger sister, Sana, to turn the TV off, dismissing the coverage: it’s all lies. But for Iman, a loyal servant of the state, this is an act of betrayal. He does not rule his home with outright violence but with a quieter, more insidious force—the expectation of compliance. He has built his life on the premise that the system is righteous, that its will is divine. To question the state would be to question himself—to admit, even momentarily, that he may be complicit in something monstrous. And so, when Rezvan refuses to back down, baldly telling him that he is wrong, that he is too close to the problem to see it, Iman does not engage. He dismisses. This scene, deceptively simple in its execution, constructs the family dinner as a compressed allegory for the mechanisms of power itself. The father views debate as disobedience; the mother, Najmeh, caught between duty and doubt, hesitates but does not intervene; the daughters, bristling against imposed boundaries, embody the nascent rebellion of a generation refusing to inherit their parents’ submission. Rasoulof does not cloak his protagonist, Iman, in ambiguity—he is not a reluctant cog in the system, nor a man wracked with moral indecision. He is, instead, a willing functionary, one who does not hesitate when handed the power to end lives.

A harrowing scene occurs when Rezvan’s college friend, Sadaf, returns from a protest, bloodied and disfigured. A shotgun loaded with buckshot has torn into her face, leaving her possibly blind in one eye. Rasoulof does not shy away from this horror. The camera, wielded by cinematographer Pooyan Aghababaei, lingers over the raw wounds as Najmeh extracts each tiny metal ball from Safdaf’s flesh with tweezers. This is not merely one woman’s suffering—it is the suffering of countless Iranians, condensed into a single, excruciating image. The state relies on its citizens’ ability to ignore, to carry on. But in this moment, the audience is denied that comfort. The camera does not cut away—much like the Iranian people themselves, who are forced to live with these brutalities daily. The editing, too, is sharp, with Andrew Bird ensuring that every image of dissent and state violence is felt viscerally. Shaky phone footage, batons, bullets, motionless bodies—Bird and Aghababaei refuse to dilute Rasoulof’s vision, allowing long takes to unfold in their raw intensity.

The crisis that pushes the story into its final, suffocating act is not a direct act of rebellion, nor an external threat, but uncertainty. The handgun issued to Iman by the state goes missing. The missing gun becomes a manifestation of the paranoia that defines life under authoritarian rule. Iman begins to see betrayal in his own family’s eyes. Rasoulof’s masterstroke is in his refusal to provide easy resolutions. What begins as a patriarch’s quiet confidence in his family’s obedience ends in a desperate grasp for control over something that has already slipped away. Iman, no longer content with ideological authority, locks his own family away, treating them as he would any dissenter under his jurisdiction. The line between the patriarch and the patriarch-as-state dissolves entirely. The film’s most unsettling image is a blindfolded Rezvan, pressed against a bare wall. The composition is as austere as the system it represents. In this moment, Rasoulof distills the violence of the state into its purest form—the father, the judge stripping his child of agency as the regime does to its people. Rasoulof does not need to spell out the metaphor—the family, as always, is a microcosm of the state. He offers no arcs of redemption, no neat resolutions. Instead, he presents a suffocating portrait of complicity, resistance, and the inescapable reckoning that awaits those who believe they can wield the tools of oppression without becoming its victims. What begins as an intimate domestic drama unfurls into something far greater—an unflinching portrait of power’s final refuge. Because when a dictator can no longer control the streets, he retreats to the home. And when the walls of the home begin to collapse—where does tyranny go next?

How to cite: Singh, Ananya. “Strangled by Power: Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 13 Feb. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/02/13/fig.

Ananya Singh is a reviewer and occasional writer. Books, films, and music keep her sane and she spends most of her time buried in history, politics, and literature drawn especially to the obscure and the eccentric. You can find her on Twitter or reach out at ananyadhiraj7@gmail.com. [Read all contributions by Ananya Singh.]