Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof made “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” entirely in secret in Tehran during 2023 when he was under threat of arrest by his own government — meaning production could’ve shut down at any moment. Iran was, of course, never going to submit the dissident filmmaker’s scorching indictment of Iranian patriarchy to the Oscars. Germany, which had a producing hand in the feature and where writer/director Rasoulof completed it post-production, did however. He fled from Iran to Germany after a 28-day trek to avoid arrest and even worse. Watch an exclusive behind-the-scenes featurette about the film below.
As I wrote in my Cannes review of the film, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” “is an anguished cry from the heart of Mohammad Rasoulof, the Iranian filmmaker who just fled his home country for Europe after an eight-year prison sentence from the Islamic Republic. This is not the first brush with theocratic law for the dissident director, who’s been working steadily out of Iran for two decades … With the brutal 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini by government hands as his launching point, Rasoulof crafts an extraordinarily gripping allegory about the corrupting costs of power and the suppression of women under a religious patriarchy that crushes the very people it claims to protect.”
“We were lucky having a story about a family whose women were wearing the veil,” said Rasoulof in conversation with IndieWire recently. “And the urban parts of the story allowed us to be on the streets without attracting too much attention. This was quite fortunate for us to be able to shoot outdoors, and we could continue working in the crowded parts of Tehran. We kept getting insulted by people who were passing by thinking we were working for the state media.”
To keep the production and his actors safe, Rasoulof distanced himself from the set at all times.
“Sometimes I was very far away. Sometimes I was closer, but depending on where I was, I wasn’t there,” he told IndieWire. “I was managing this set with the assistance of two of my assistants. One of them was working with the technical crew, and one of them was working with the actors and designers.”
Learn more about the film’s production in the video below.
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is now in theaters from Neon.
