Iranian director risks Cannes appearance after escaping arrest

Mohammad Rasoulof fled Iran and arrived at the French film festival via a safe house in Germany to premiere “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which is now the odds-on frontrunner for the Palme d’Or.

By Jada Yuan

CANNES, France — Even outside the Palais, the applause and cheers for Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof was deafening.

An outspoken critic of the Iranian regime, Rasoulof was at the Cannes Film Festival to debut “The Seeds of the Sacred Fig,” a thriller about the family of a government worker in Tehran that descends into a terrifying web of mistrust and paranoia, mirroring the circumstances created by the country’s oppressive dictatorship. It’s a film Rasoulof had to complete in secret while on the run after being sentenced to eight years in prison, plus flogging and the confiscation of his property, by Iran’s Revolutionary Court for “security” violations. The sentence, Rasoulof’s lawyer wrote, was essentially for “signing statements and making films and documentaries.”

On May 13, the day before the festival began, Rasoulof’s representatives broke the news that he was safe, having fled to a safe house in Germany. It wasn’t clear until a day or so ago that he’d be able to attend at all. On the red carpet and inside the theater, Rasoulof held aloft photos of two of his actors, Soheila Golestani and Missagh Zareh, who had been unable to secure permission to leave Iran for the premiere. Golestani, who plays the family’s matriarch and is an outspoken anti-hijab protester in her personal life, is under arrest for similar security charges to the ones Rasoulof faced. (Meanwhile, a popular rapper, Toomaj Salehi, has been sentenced to death for his songs.)

Before Friday’s premiere, a multinational crowd pressed up against barricades, barely able to see the top of Rasoulof’s head as he walked along a mostly empty red carpet for an unglamorous 3:30 p.m. time slot. They’d come just to support the fact that he had come.

As Rasoulof entered the Grand Théâtre Lumière, an audience of more than 2,000 cheered him for four minutes before he could sit down. And at the end of the nearly three-hour film, the standing ovation was instantaneous and by far the longest received by any film in competition at the festival, starting the moment the last frame played and continuing for at least fifteen minutes.

Fellow Iranian director Ali Abbasi — now an expat in Copenhagen whose film “The Apprentice” about a young Donald Trump is also in competition — had given his friend a long hug when he walked in and was front and center for his friend’s standing O, egging the crowd on. Someone in the audience held up a sign in the colors of the Iranian flag reading “Femme! Vie! Liberté!” (“Woman! Life! Freedom!”). The crowd roared every time it was displayed on the theater’s screen for even people in the rafters to see.

Rasoulof is now considered the undeniable front-runner for the Palme d’Or.

“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” takes place in modern-day Tehran, where an ambitious lawyer Iman (Zareh) has just been given a promotion to be a state inspector after 20 years of serving the regime — one rung away from the job as a judge he’s always wanted. The work is dangerous enough for him to start carrying a gun and hide the nature of his work from his family, which is just as well because it mostly involves signing death warrants without inspecting the validity of the charges. As the nation breaks out in protests against the regime for its misogynistic religious persecution of women, Iman finds himself signing 300 death warrants a day.

Zareh and Golestani in “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” (Cannes Film Festival)

Ultimately, though, the film belongs to the women in it. Iman’s two daughters, college-aged Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and high-schooler Sana (Setareh Maleki) become politically activated watching the protests play out on social media, getting around the censorship through the use of a VPN. They double down in their activism when one of Rezvan’s friends gets disfigured at a rally.

Sounds of weeping could be heard throughout the Cannes audience during an intimate scene with their conservative mother, Najmeh (Golestani). There were also multiple applause breaks as the daughters grow bolder in questioning their father’s worldviews.

Then Iman’s gun goes missing, and the father turns the techniques he uses in his legal life onto his own family. Is he descending into madness, or is this his true nature coming forth? Rasoulof leaves that ambiguous. But the beginning of the film explains that the titular sacred fig is known for latching onto a host tree and squeezing it to death until the plant can stand on its own.

Before this premiere, Rasoulof had already served two prison terms for the political nature of his previous films and had his passport revoked in 2017. He’d been in the middle of shooting “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” he told Deadline in an interview, when he found out his prison sentence was confirmed. He finished filming during the appeal process — shooting mainly interiors and using documentary footage for exteriors to avoid being detected. He had just two hours to leave the country after getting the news that his appeal had been denied and had to leave all electronic devices behind to avoid being tracked. His border crossing took a “harrowing” 28 days of hiding out in villages and relying on aid from young people he’d met through his prior imprisonments.

That the film — which was bought by Neon a week ago — is even seeing the light of day is something of a miracle. Rasoulof has faced constant pressure from Iran not to release it, and he revealed that his director of photographer’s office was raided and his materials confiscated. The sound engineer has also been harassed, and the film’s three youngest actresses have all fled the country, Rasoulof said. Speaking with Variety this week, Rasoulof said he will still make films about Iran even in exile: “Iran is still inside me, and I still can go on telling Iranian stories and conveying them to the rest of the world.”

In a speech delivered at the Cannes premiere in Farsi with French translation, Rasoulof told the crowd about the many members of the cast and crew who were still stuck in the country at great danger to their lives — and expressed a hope for a better future for Iran.

By Jada Yuan

Jada Yuan is a writer for The Washington Post's Style section focusing on culture and entertainment, after several years covering national politics and two very different First Ladies. She spent 2018 circumnavigating the globe as the first 52 Places Traveler for The New York Times, and was a longtime culture writer for New York magazine.Twitter