Mohammad Rasoulof made it to the Cannes premiere of his film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” but only after a perilous escape from Iran before an eight-year prison term was handed down by authorities. The auteur arrived in Europe 28 days after hitting the road with a backpack filled with nothing more than a few pieces of clothing.
The experience was equivalent to being on a battlefield, he said, until he arrived in a city that offered the relative safety of a German consulate. “The process of leaving Iran was, in fact, quite harrowing, and it was very, very scary, especially the mountainous road that I had to take to leave and go to a neighboring country,” Rasoulof says.
“Fig” is set during the 2022 protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman arrested for violating the regime’s compulsory-hijab law. Rasoulof was inspired to make the film while imprisoned for criticizing government repression of civilian protests. One of the guards took the auteur to a corner of the prison unseen by the security cameras.
As Rasoulof recalls: “He asked me, ‘What do you think is going to happen at the end of these protests?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I have no idea. You are the one who’s outside. How would I know?’ And he said, ‘Well, I mean, what is your assessment? It looks quite scary. So, when the protests end, do you think you are willing to say that we did not mistreat you in prison?’ And that gave me the understanding that there is this very deep chasm between what’s happening within the system itself.”
After Rasoulof was released, his lawyers informed him that they believed he’d land a much longer prison term for signing statements and making films and documentaries against the regime. “I really didn’t want to play the role of a victim,” he recalls. “I couldn’t come to terms with it. And at that point, I knew that I had to leave Iran. Either they would arrest me on the set of shooting this film, or the eight-year sentence that my lawyers were thinking would happen would actually become a conviction, and I would have to go to jail,” again.
The Iranian auteur had conceived of a movie centered on censorship, but meeting with another prison official sparked “Fig’s” storyline. When the officer told the filmmaker that he was contemplating suicide because of pressure from his family and his children about working within the system, he “gave me a pen in prison that made me want to write a story about a family in which there was a deep split between the family members in the way they looked at the events.”
When Rasoulof got out of prison and started watching videos of the protests that people had taken with their cellphones, he had even more motivation.
“Fig” ended up a textbook example of a clandestine film. The crew was always going to be seen in public, but Rasoulof directed virtually from a distance. And if anyone approached them, the actors would switch to a different, “Plan B” approved script.
In one instance, the actors had to act as stunt drivers in a chase scene, hitting one another’s cars, which, in retrospect, Rasoulof admits was “crazy.” There was also a key moment where the family patriarch (Missagh Zareh) has a dramatic fall. The production initially recruited several stuntpeople for that scene but realized that because those professionals constantly went from one project to another, “Fig” would be discovered if they showed up on set.
“In the end, he decided to do it himself, which was a very dangerous thing to do,” Rasoulof notes. “And so really this film would not have been possible and would not have finished without all these sacrifices that all the crew members made.”
In March, Rasoulof learned his conviction was going to be upheld. He would be sentenced to eight years for certain, and when the film was screened, he might be looking at a new term of 10 to 15 years overall.
The connections he made during his last incarceration helped get him to freedom.
“When I was serving time, I also met people out of luck who told me that if I ever decide to leave Iran, they can help me do that,” Rasoulof says. “So, when I left my home, the first thing I did was contact those people that I thought I knew well in a secure way, and they helped me leave Iran.”
But before he left, Rasoulof had one simple instruction: “I just told my editor, under any circumstances, you just have to finish this film. Doesn’t matter whether I get arrested or not.”
“Fig” was not only completed but screened at Cannes, where it won a special prize from the competition jury. A few months later, Germany selected it as its international film submission for the Academy Awards. And yet, while speaking from an undisclosed and secure location, Rasoulof’s harrowing escape is still fresh in his mind.
“I really did think about taking this as material for a film as I was going through that journey,” Rasoulof reveals. “And I think the process of healing these traumas is really best through artistic creation. I also hope that very soon the people of Iran and U.S. Iranians who have to be outside Iran can be deciding about where to live and how they want to live.”
