Mohammad Rasoulof (There Is No Evil, The White Meadows), Spiga d'Honneur in 2018, has fled Iran after being sentenced to eight years in prison and flogging because of his political cinema. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Special Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Award at the Cannes Film Festival, is an intriguing social drama with thriller elements that shows the social reality of the country through the intimacy of a family. Iman is a lawyer working for the Iranian government and is on his way to becoming a judge. But as he becomes aware of what his new position entails, he begins to question the system in which he finds himself, while at home conflicts break out with his wife and two daughters. Meanwhile, protests are rising in the streets from the ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement, which grew out of the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody and which Rasoulof incorporates through actual archive footage.
Mohammad Rasoulof
Born in Shiraz (Iran) in 1972, he studied Sociology before turning to film. After making his second film, ‘Iron Island’, opportunities for him to make and screen his work grew increasingly restricted. He has directed a dozen feature films, all of them victims of Iranian censorship. He has won numerous international awards for his filmography, including several prizes in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes for films such as ‘The White Meadows’ (2009), ‘Manuscripts Don’t Burn’ (2013) and ‘Man of Integrity’ (2017). In 2018 Seminci dedicated a retrospective and a monograph to his figure, and in 2020 he won the Golden Bear and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Berlin Festival thanks to ‘There is No Evil’, which won a special mention from the Jury in Valladolid. Days before the Cannes premiere of ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ (2024), his latest film, which won the Special Jury Prize and the Critics’ Prize, he was sentenced in his country to eight years’ imprisonment and flogging for crimes against national security, after which he decided to leave Iran.
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