Iranian Films at Cannes Reflect Mounting Rage Against Repressive Regime See First Look Ima

As Cannes collectively wonders whetherIranian director Mohammad Rasoulof will be on the red carpet Friday to premiere his latest work, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, one thing is sure. Iranian cinema is bursting with mounting rage against the regimes repression.

As Cannes collectively wonders whether Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof will be on the red carpet Friday to premiere his latest work, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” one thing is sure. Iranian cinema is bursting with mounting rage against the regime’s repression.

And this rage is becoming a creative catalyst for filmmakers to break new cinematic ground. Perhaps no one more dramatically exemplifies this change than Rasoulof, who clandestinely fled the country after being sentenced to eight years in prison and flogging for making the film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” 

Significantly, in “Sacred Fig” women appear on screen without a headscarf, which is probably why Rasoulof was punished.

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But he’s not alone. Though they depict antithetic worlds, both works by Iranian directors playing at Cannes this year — Rasoulof’s Iran-set “Sacred Fig” and Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump drama “The Apprentice” — stem, albeit in different ways, from the Iranian regime’s conservative crackdown and the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini that has marked a turning point for Iran.

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“It’s interesting to see Ali Abbasi and Mohammad Rasoulof this year in Cannes, both of them in competition,” said Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who won the Cannes best actress award in 2022 for her role as a journalist trying to solve the murders of Iranian prostitutes in Abbasi’s “Holy Spider.” “I think Ali has lots of respect for Mohammad and his movies,” she added.

Ebrahimi also noted that Abbasi, who lives and makes movies outside Iran, belongs to a new generation of Iranian directors who “don’t want to censor themselves” in any way. “Sometimes I think we were are all condemned to be meta, to use metaphor,” she said. “And that’s why everyone called Iranian cinema very poetic and metaphoric,” Ebrahimi added, referring to the works of consecrated masters such as the late Abbas Kiarostami, as well as Jafar Panahi and Asghar Farhadi, which relied more on parables than polemics. “I think the new generation, they just try to go for it and in this way ‘Holy Spider’ can be a big influence, because there’s no metaphor in it,” she said.

“Young filmmakers, especially enabled by technology, are looking for new ways to tell stories,” said Alireza Khatami who — case in point — co-directed Tehran-set underground film “Terrestrial Verses,” which launched in Cannes last year and provides an absurdist, no-holds-barred take on the tragic plight that Iranians face in their everyday life. And, Khatami noted, the new generation of directors are totally disregarding Iranian government norms in terms of what can be put on screen.

“They don’t care about getting permits,” said Dubai-based Iranian producer Kaveh Farnam, who has produced several of Rasoulof’s films, though not his latest one. “But, of course, this comes with consequences.”

Rasoulof, who is among Iran’s most prominent directors even though none of his films have screened in Iran, has always refused to be muzzled or even muted. He’s made his films more or less clandestinely, starting with his “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” (2013), followed by “A Man of Integrity” (2017) and “There Is No Evil” (2020), and been arrested and had his passport confiscated several times.

This time after his prison sentence, however, Rasoulof felt compelled to escape to an undisclosed location in Europe, knowing he will probably never be able to return to his homeland, at least under the current regime, after making “Sacred Fig.” 

The film, according to the synopsis provided by sales company Films Boutique, centers on Iman — an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran — who grapples with mistrust and paranoia as nationwide political protests intensify and his gun mysteriously disappears. Suspecting the involvement of his wife Najmeh and his daughters, Rezvan and Sana, he imposes drastic measures at home, causing tensions to rise. 

“Up until a few years ago we tried to make movies somehow operating within the system,” said Farnam. “But now we know it’s useless … And when you see [on social media] a 14-year-old girl standing in front of the police and taking off her hijab, which is a highly altruistic act, you somehow know that it’s the nature of cinema to do the same thing.”

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