In one of the first scenes of The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024), an Iranian couple, Iman and Najmeh, are up early and about to start their day. In a living room that is eerily quiet and dim with a red lamp, Najmeh is preparing breakfast, but stops to caress Iman’s face. She reassures him that his prayers have finally been answered after he was promoted to the position of investigating judge for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court. Yet Iman doesn’t seem to share this pride – he has only spoken with low energy up to this point in the film; he hasn’t been able to fall asleep; and he hasn’t eaten food for over a day. He is disturbed, perhaps, by the fact that he will soon be sentencing scores of political prisoners to death.

The turmoil that overwhelms Iman and his family in the wake of nationwide protests engulfing Iran takes centre stage in Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s latest drama and thriller. Nominated by Germany for Best Foreign Film in this year’s Academy Awards, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is about the events that unfold as Iman is commanded by his superiors to convict prisoners without evidence. He is given a pistol for self-defence, so that he can protect himself against protestors – but after losing it, he grows mistrustful of his family, assuming that they stole it and are conspiring to kill him.

The plot is remarkably private, focusing on the dynamics among Iman’s family, mostly in the confines of their home. Yet the characters are inherently connected with their wider environment. Najmeh, Iman, and their two daughters, Rezvan and Sana, are struck by intensifying protests on the streets, which are portrayed in the form of phone-recorded sounds and footage from the 2022-23 Mahsa Amini demonstrations. The film is inherently political and almost a documentary – so much so that Rasoulof and other crew members (ironically) have been forced to flee from Iran in exile to avoid the persecution they were seeking to expose.

Since the 1960s, the art of film has been a crucial means by which Iranians have engaged with their country’s culture. At the same time, Iranians in Iran and from the diaspora have found overwhelming success abroad: they have been nominated for 24 Oscars and won four of them, and have been premiered almost constantly at prestigious international film festivals, such as the Sundance, Cannes, and Berlin. These films have shared several common characteristics, which serve as the key elements of modern Iranian subjectivity. Understanding them helps us to appreciate just how special The Seed of the Sacred Fig is in shaping the future of this artistic tradition.

They are characterised, firstly, by powerfully humble narratives about everyday people. In Abbas Kiarostami’s celebrated drama Where is The Friend’s House? (1987), for example, an eight-year-old Ahmad takes his classmate’s notebook by accident and pledges to return it. Ahmad, played by a non-professional actor, journeys through a village’s neighbourhoods and landscapes, revealing an intimate connection with human life that is similarly represented in other masterpieces such as A Moment of Innocence (1996), Smell of Camphor, Scent of Jasmine (2000), and Rizoo (2023).

These realist stories, usually told from the perspective of an auteur, flourished in response to the commercialism of the so-called ‘film farsi’ genre, which sought to mimic Bollywood and Egyptian cinema. Groundbreaking directors, such as Masoud Kimiai and Dariush Mehrjui, broke free from this trend during the 1960s and beckoned subsequent generations of Iranian filmmakers to follow suit.

This commitment to real life inevitably leads to a sharp-eyed scrutiny of socio-cultural issues. But given the confines of free speech in modern Iran, directors and their crew have had to be wary of the delicate dialectic between artistic liberty and censorship. A good example is the psychological drama The Cow (1969). In this film, a villager believes he is turning into his cow after it dies – a plot that can be construed as having taken place during the highly controversial ‘White Revolution’ from 1963 to 1979, which impoverished many rural communities. Since anti-government protest was strictly forbidden under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s nationalist authoritarianism, which lasted until it was brought down by the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the film featured a disclaimer in its very beginning, stating that the plot happened before the Pahlavi reign. Nonetheless, the film’s subtle, metaphorical critique of the Shah’s regime and its policies remained.

The boundaries of censorship have shifted with changing political circumstances. After 1979, the Islamic Republic was founded on rule by Twelver Shi’a clerics and an interpretation of Islam that emphasised its power to emancipate human beings from oppression. For the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance, however, art that was perceived to be against the spirit of Islam was to be censored and offending works would have their permission to be distributed abroad revoked. Filmmakers, however, were still able to push the boundaries of what might be interpreted as an appropriate criticism of ‘Islam’ according to the country’s theological-political elite. With the rise of reformism, starting from the 1990s, for instance, Islam came to be understood by many as a discourse of open-mindedness. As a consequence, controversial, questioning productions, such as Time for Love (1991), became increasingly popular.

Though local in theme, Iranian cinema has always been transnational. It has found success in international festivals, taking advantage of opportunities for distribution not readily available at home. In the documentary This Is Not a Film (2011), Jafar Panahi recorded his experience under house arrest with a phone and DVD camera, smuggling a flash drive inside a birthday cake to France so that his work could be screened at Cannes and other festivals.

Iranian cinema later drew inspiration from Italian Neorealism and French New Wave from the 1960s onwards. Concurrently, it has stayed true to the rich local traditions of other Persian arts, including poetry. A perfect example of this is The House is Black (1962), a documentary about a leper colony in Tabriz, a film imbued with such unusual creativity that it can only be attributed to the mind of its poet-director, Forugh Farrokhzad.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig’s ambition places it squarely within the traditions laid out by previous pioneers, and makes several meaningful contributions of its own. For most of its duration’s two hours and 47 minutes, the characters are shown through an extraordinary representation of reality. Najmeh, Rezvan, and Sana, for one, comb each other’s hair, talk about taboo topics such as sanitary pads, and hang out at their home without wearing hijabs, revealing everyday interactions for women that rarely make it onto the screen in the Islamic Republic, owing to its laws on gender and public modesty. Sometimes the realism is graphic. For several minutes in one scene, a close-up fixates on the swollen, bloody face of one of Rezvan and Sana’s friends, Sadaf, who has participated in the anti-regime protests. Najmeh, Rezvan, and Sana perform impromptu surgery to remove the pellets under her skin. Such moments uniquely push the boundaries of possibility in socio-cultural criticism.

Rasoulof’s portrayal of events is extremely explicit, providing a window into an Iran gripped by the Mahsa Amini demonstrations. Unlike other protests since the foundation of the Islamic Republic, which have called for reform or certain changes in policy, these protests marked some of the first and most radical instances of mass support to disband the Islamic Republic itself. Protestors were brutally suppressed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) and uniformly denounced by government leaders.

The team behind The Seed of the Sacred Fig are closely connected to this movement, and the severe political risks attached to it. Rasoulof has previously lambasted the Islamic Republic throughout his career, such as in his There is No Evil (2020), a film about the country’s death penalty. He has been arrested before and is not allowed to work as a director in Iran, so all of the shots in The Seed of the Sacred Fig were made in secret. After learning that he would be sentenced to flogging and eight years in prison as a result of his controversial oeuvre, Rasoulof immediately fled Iran after he finished shooting the film; he had to edit its footage during his escape in order to submit it in time for its premiere at Cannes. Unshaken, Rasoulof still strives to set trends that liberate creative voices in Iran ‘not only because they tell stories that power doesn’t want to hear’, as he explained, ‘but because their courage is very contagious’.

Now living in exile in Germany, Rasoulof’s relationship with place is evolving. That the selection committees organised by German Films chose The Seed of the Sacred Fig – a film made entirely in Persian and shot in Iran with Iranian actors – as their country’s nomination for the Oscars emphasises this point. In this sense, Iranian films are increasingly becoming western ones, and, as a result, artists and audiences alike might find themselves asking new questions about the significance of these stories. For instance, how will western audiences understand the criticisms directed against the Islamic Republic in The Seed of the Sacred Fig, especially within Rasoulof’s new home of Germany? Will they use the film as justification for orientalist tropes about Islam? How will the surging popularity of the AfD affect refugees like Rasoulof and their ability to make art? If Rasoulof and others like him in Europe are granted extended asylum, to what extent will they begin to expand their concerns to their new homes, criticising their adopted countries with the same poise as they do their Iranian homeland?

Based upon recent experience, it seems likely that the transnational relationship between Iranian cinema and the rest of the world will continue to develop and intensify. When Asghar Farhadi won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars for A Separation (2011), his speech honoured Iranians around the world and vaguely denounced the role of ‘politicians’ in smearing the beauty of their culture. But when he won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars for The Salesman (2016), he refused to accept his award in person, in solidarity with those affected by President Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim ban.’ His statement was specific to American politics, remarking that Trump’s ‘“us” and “our enemies” categories create fear’, and calling upon his fellow directors to ‘turn their cameras to capture shared human qualities.’ Iranian filmmakers such as Rasoulof, Farhadi, and others like them are now creating art for the West as well as for Iran, inviting us to seek truth through empathy and nuance.