How Iranian Filmmaker Challenged Regime

On a cool fall night in October, just hours after Iran had launched rockets at targets in Israel, one of the Islamic Republic’s most famous dissidents sat a New York hotel restaurant and wondered if he’d ever get back home.

Mohammad Rasoulof had made one of the most politically potent feature films about the country in years — at great risk to his life — and all he wanted was to be back in the country he hopes to change.

“I walk in the U.S. or Europe and see people who are not me and ask myself: Can I belong? I want to be home,” the 51-year-old noted via a translator, a youthful dance in his eye given the ordeals he’s faced. “But it was more important to me to finish this project.”

“This project” is The Seed of the Sacred Fig, and it would be hard to overstate either the dangers Rasoulof faced making it or his boldness in standing up to them.

The director took his life in his hands every day in Tehran that he convened people to make a film opposing the Iranian regime. When he was done, he went on the run, knowing that if he stayed, he’d end up in prison or worse. He took the film with him as he sneaked across borders and through neighboring countries until eventually making it to safety in Germany. Rasoulof arrived in Europe just before a premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, his body and the film relievedly intact. (He is now based in Germany and has made select trips elsewhere in the free world, including a trip to the New York Film Festival, where this interview took place.)

Neon will release Sacred Fig in the U.S. on Nov. 27 as one of the more consequential film openings in recent memory — a cinematic cry for help smuggled out of a country where anyone calling for liberation is liable to be jailed or murdered. The official Oscar entry from Germany (it’s widely expected to land on the international shortlist), it pulls no punches in showing both the willingness of a younger generation to protest despite grave risks and the brazenness of a regime in striking them down.

Though more narrative than Jafar Panahi’s 2011 landmark This Is Not a Film — which got around a filmmaking ban by appearing to simply be about people dropping by the director’s home — the two movies share some commonalities. Both tell a story of daring civil disobedience and serve as their own best example of it.

Iran has undergone a series of earth-shaking changes in the past few years. First came the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, which led to those large-scale Woman, Life, Freedom protests in the fall of 2022 and the ensuing crackdowns.

Then came the fight by the government’s proxy militias across the Middle East against Israel beginning Oct. 7, 2023, and the reprisals against it. May brought the sudden death in a helicopter crash of hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi, leading to the election of the more moderate Masoud Pezeshkian in June — though how much wiggle room he has under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the 85-year-old cleric who runs the country, remains to be seen. The country has been jolted this fall by the regime’s killing of German-Iranian dissident Jamshid Sharmahd and the decision last week by longtime dissident Kianoosh Sanjari to take his own life as a final act of protest on behalf of the country’s many political prisoners.

Rasoulof is part of a small group of dissident filmmakers — many of whom have had to flee Iran — making so-called “non-state projects” in the hope of bringing about liberal reforms. These are movies that do not pass through national censorship forces and their whitewashing of any regime criticism. (Rasoulof won the Berlinale’s Golden Bear in 2020 for his reform-minded death penalty drama There Is No Evil.) State projects show a rosy Iran where the fundamentalist government gives people a good life and can do no wrong. Non-state ones, of course, do no such thing.

Rasoulof had been in prison before, arrested in 2022 for criticizing the government. While there, he ended up in the hospital, where he found himself in the unusual position of hearing the policemen guarding him say they had watched a pirated copy of There Is No Evil and liked it. They put it on and watched it with him again. “I was stuck in the prison hospital watching a movie about repression,” he says wryly.

GUERRILLA FILMMAKING

A family drama and a political parable, Rasoulof’s new film concerns a recently promoted “investigative judge” named Iman (Missagh Zareh) — really a rubber-stamper there to bureaucracy-wash the regime’s brutalities — and his brief hesitation before embracing his malevolent role full-on.

That would have been enough for a charged political statement — how good people become corrupt when their own future and quality of life are on the line. But the story doesn’t stop there. Instead, Sacred Fig centers on the activism of daughter Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), who is becoming increasingly engaged with the Women, Life, Freedom protests. That activism leads to a direct conflict with her father — and complicated entanglements for her younger sister, Sana (Setareh Maleki), and mother, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani). It eventually moves the film to a place of violent family division that is also easily read as a metaphor for the way Iranian crackdowns have fractured and imperiled the country itself.

Making the movie was its own form of risk-taking. Locations would often be sent to actors and a small crew just a few hours before start time. Sometimes production would come off. And sometimes the crew would arrive and quickly need to scatter; producers had spotted some suspicious people nearby, and it was too risky to go through with the day. “It was not a situation you could really plan for,” says Mani Tilgner, one of the film’s producers.

Street scenes, meanwhile, could only be shot with extreme caution, and usually only scenes involving the hijab, the veil for women whose removal has become a symbol in the fight for liberation and modernism. That could lead to some amusing situations. “Once we were filming scenes with hijabs and some people passed by and said, ‘Look at this poor state production, no one will watch it,’ ” Rostami recalls in a video interview, laughing. “I thought, ‘If they only knew.’ “

To get around the problem of shooting the protest scenes — which, of course, would have featured women without hijabs — Rasoulof came upon an ingenious solution: He interpolated footage from the actual Women, Life, Freedom protests. Not only did it look more authentic, it didn’t risk having his cast arrested and his production shut down.

Getting footage out of the country, even for editing, wasn’t easy. Rasoulof was working with editor Andrew Bird, who lives in Berlin.

“I sometimes wouldn’t know where the footage would be, or if there would be any,” Bird tells THR. He would regularly go into a series of shadow accounts to retrieve it, as filmmakers tried to stay one digital step ahead of censors and government intelligence agents. “It wasn’t just sent to my email address, let’s put it that way.”

Bird told no one what he was working on and edited on an offline computer with his phone in the other room.

SENTENCED TO PRISON

As the film was being made, Rasoulof was handed an eight-year prison sentence for his efforts (ironically, by one of the very investigative judges his movie critiques). Many in his cast and crew were brought in for questioning. His lawyer told him fighting such a sentence was impossible. All they could try was an appeal-based legal maneuver that might buy them seven or eight weeks. Rasoulof told him to pursue it. “It was just enough time to finish the film,” he says with a shrug.

When the prison date approached, Rasoulof ran.

Fortunately, while in prison the previous time, he met other dissidents — folks necessarily skilled in the fugitive arts — and they would prove valuable in helping him sneak out of the country this time, providing him with contacts and guidance on bypassing checkpoints. The best way to escape, it turns out, is to get sent to prison first.

It took Rasoulof two weeks to reach Germany. He sent edits back and forth to Bird as he went.

The actors faced their own crucibles.

“I was fearful in taking on this role. But the anger was much greater,” Rostami tells THR via Zoom from Germany.

The young woman’s own journey to activism parallels that of her character. She was proud to act in state productions for years, but when the 2022 protests came around, she decided to stop and only take on subversive projects — underground theater and the like. Shortly after completing this film she, too, fled. She has no idea if and when she can return to Iran.

Maleki, who plays her sister, also fled to Germany, and the two talk every day. The two adult actors, Golestani and Zareh, are believed to still be in Iran.

Becoming an example of the very victimhood they critiqued was certainly not their goal. But Rostami and Rasoulof are also keenly aware of, and even amused by the irony of, how their lives have played out. No one wants to be a poster child for injustice, but it does make selling a film a lot easier.

You can feel the guilt Rasoulof bears for those he left behind. While his immediate family is outside Iran, his sister remains in the country. She put her house up as collateral for his bail and lost it when he fled.

There is guilt, too, that he didn’t continue the protests and fights from within. You can feel the tension roiling inside Rasoulof, trying to square the pain of exile with the bliss of telling a story he could never have told if he stayed. It would be too glib to see his story simply as one of escape. More than just a daring physical exit, Rasoulof’s life is that of trying to wriggle out of a more existential dilemma, one that has him caught between being with his people and telling their story — between fighting for freedom and having it.

“A few days ago I asked Alfonso Cuarón, ‘If you were in a despotic situation, could you make Gravity?’ ” Rasoulof says. “He said, ‘I cannot imagine I could.’ This is a philosophical question. Life — where do you belong, what is your priority? What can you do where you are versus being somewhere else? I didn’t want to just focus on myself. If I stayed, it would have meant doing that.”

He continues, “We have billions of other galaxies. In this part of the Milky Way that we are in, I ask myself, ‘What am I compared with this vastness in this complex and beautiful world? What can I do to find some meaning?’ “

He looks out the window at the streetlit midtown Manhattan tableau, alive with a nighttime buzz of people rushing off to dinner or hurrying home after a long day.

“I don’t feel like I’m a part of this city or this place,” he says. “But I do feel like I’m a part of something larger, and that’s enough.”

This story first appeared in a November stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.