CANNES 2024 - remote notes

[Chris Knipp]

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (Mohammad Rasoulof)

In Competition. (Original title: دانه*ی انجیر معابد) Rasoulof, Iran's most political filmmaker, has now fled Iran after receiving another prison sentence, this time of 8 years. THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG, "shot clandestinely and set for the most part in one somber Tehran apartment," is "a dark and sprawling 3-hour family drama" that "is very much about Iran’s draconian legal system and what it does to the human psyche, which is obviously a subject Rasoulof knows intimately," says Jordan Mintzer (HOLLYWOOD REPORTER). . It's a "powerful indictment of Iranian oppression through the eyes of one family's breakdown," says Mintzer, "With the brutal 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini by government hands as his launching point," says Ryan Lattanzio (INDIEWIRE),the film is a "gripping allegory" about "the corrupting costs of power" and oppression of women "under a religious patriarchy that crushes the very people it claims to protect." The father here is a newly appointed almost-judge now expected to condemn a man without mercy.. His two daughters participate in the anti-hijab demonstrations by taking in a young woman who has been arrested and shot in the face. As part of his higher status the father is issued a pistol, which disappears. He starts accusing people, and violence ensues. It winds up being a horror movie, says Mintzer. And the director "has decided to focus on the very kinds of people who have been making his life hell." Bradshaw in the GUARDIAN gives the film 4/5 stars and calls it "a brazen and startling picture which, though flawed, does justice to the extraordinary and scarcely believable drama of his own situation and the agony of his homeland." In a later GUARDIAN Cannes roundup where he describes political films in the festival, Bradshaw wrote of SEED OF THE SACRED FIG, "It attempts to intuit the nightmare experienced by dissenting women by taking a downbeat political and domestic drama and progressively escalating it to a violent confrontation that resembled a pueblo shootout by Sergio Leone." The Cannes premiere received an almost-fifteen-minute standing ovation.


ORIGINAL POSTER WITH THE TITLE & DIRECTOR'S NAME IN FARSI