Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 167 minutes
Release Date: November 25th, 2022 (USA)
Studio: Neon
Director(s): Mohammad Rasoulof
Writer(s): Mohammad Rasoulof

It’s what the TV said.

While a crucial source for propaganda and indoctrination, the internet and social media are also great ways of disseminating truth. It’s why oppressive regimes work so hard to flood international sectors with the former while throttling the latter from ever reaching screens within their own borders.

This fact is at the core of Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig by way of pitting a father (Missagh Zareh’s Iman, a newly promoted investigating judge who sells his soul by green-lighting whatever deaths his prosecutor demands under the blind faith of “God’s Will”) against his progressive teenage daughters (Mahsa Rostami’s Rezvan and Setareh Maleki’s Sana, advocates for the feminist protests demanding an end to Shariah Law and the hijab) while their matriarch (Soheila Golestani’s Najmeh) desperately tries to bridge the gap.

It’s a blunt script that leans heavily into both the hypocrisy of people letting their own rights be trampled and the fear-driven desire to “follow draconian rules” so you don’t receive the same punishment you dole out—as if “kill or be killed” is what a worthy God demands. Things do get repetitive and drawn out to the point of seeming like Rasoulof has intentionally made this film for outsiders to understand rather than insiders to wake-up, but it’s effective nonetheless.

Nothing that happens is ever a surprise and everything Najmeh and Iman warn about will eventually unfold to both shock audiences and push the characters into corners so their true colors can finally be revealed. Who really cares more about their family and who only worries about credibility and reputation? When does a parent’s love stop being about providing their kids a promising future and more about maintaining their own comfortable present?

It never ceases to amaze me when people raise good kids only to wonder why they don’t also think murdering the poor, oppressed, and marginalized is “good policy.” Unfortunately, that stubbornness ensures those seeds (an enlightened youth movement martyring itself for equality—viewer beware because real-life, grisly footage is spliced throughout) will only ever prosper by strangling the trees (slaves to archaic, totalitarian, and repressive “norms”) that birthed them to death.

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[L-R] Soheila Golestani, Mahsa Rostami, and Setareh Maleki in THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG; courtesy of Neon.