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There’s a funny phrase in Hollywood — ‘director’s jail’ — that gets thrown around whenever a filmmaker finds their career in stasis after making a particularly high-profile flop. Reputations are certainly tarnished. Some go into television instead, and some never get back in the saddle. But, so far, no one there has ever been to jail for moviemaking. Not even in the paranoid early ’50s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee waged war on active Communist Party members, particularly those working in the liberal arts.
In Iran, though, incarceration is a very real threat, as director Mohammad Rasoulof knows all too well. The director of The Seed of the Sacred Fig — now Germany’s official submission for Best International Feature Film — Rasoulof caused a stir earlier this year when his film, his 10th, was selected for Cannes. Having confiscated his passport, the Iranian authorities ordered the 52-year-old to pull the film; meanwhile, in a court case linked to his political activism, Rasoulof had been declared guilty by Tehran’s Revolutionary Court with the likely outcome of an eight-year prison sentence and forfeiture of all his assets. He would also be lashed, something else that doesn’t tend to happen to profligate auteurs in the West.
Rasoulof didn’t hang around. When the news broke, he and some of his cast and crew made a break for it, taking a journey that took several weeks (the details are sketchy, for obvious reasons) and landed him in Germany, where he was granted asylum. “A few days after the shooting of the film ended,” he recalls, “I told my friends outside Iran that I was about to leave. I told them, ‘What happens now is that I will have to cut myself off from all kinds of communications online. The film is now in your hands, and you will have to get this finished no matter what happens. If I get arrested, you have the responsibility of finishing the film. And I don’t know when I will be able to touch base with you next, but I will try.’”
The idea for The Seed of the Sacred Fig had come to him while serving a year in jail for shooting without a permit. “There was a mix of prisoners of conscience and criminals when I was there,” he recalls. “But for me, it was somewhat of a discovery, because I was trying to focus more on the prison officials and trying to understand their perspective as opposed to having a confrontational relationship with them. The other interesting part for me was that I was watching the political events that were unfolding outside — the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement — from behind bars. And that in itself, watching it with other prisoners from inside the prison, was a very unique experience.”
Watching with him was the famous Iranian director Jafar Panahi. “Jafar and I were together in prison, and we would see each other after we were released,” he says. “So, when I wanted to start this project, I told him, ‘I’m quite afraid of what I’m about to do,’ and what he had to say to me was, ‘Just get started. Go in, and you will forget about your fears.’”
The story he wrote concerns Iman, a married lawyer with two teenage daughters, who is promoted to become an investigating judge. His role is meant to be kept secret, but when his cover is blown, Iman takes his family to the ruins of his childhood home. Now in the middle of nowhere, Iman begins to realize that, just as Iranian society is losing ground to the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, he is powerless to assert control of his own family.
Even by Rasoulof’s usual standards, this was a highly charged political subject. “I have been making underground films for a very long time,” he says, “but I never felt the sense of danger that I did this time, because I knew I was approaching an eight-year sentence and I knew that if they caught me making this film they would add to the sentence, and I would have to go to prison for it. So that made me, and a few other people who were key deciders of the film, put our experiences together and come up with solutions [to avoid suspicion]. We decided to go with a very small group and with very limited and clear resources.”
Finding the actors was the first priority. “When the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement happened, many of the female actresses decided, or announced, that they were no longer going to appear in front of the camera with a veil or a fake veil,” he says. “That allowed me to pick from the actresses that had made that announcement for this film. This was also true about the other crew members. And some other crew members were people who had decided that they were not going to work on any state-backed projects.”
They began without any equipment. “The rehearsals were done in small get-togethers or parties,” he says. “It looked like we were having a fun time together, but in fact we were rehearsing the story with the actors.”
And when the cameras did start rolling, Rasoulof was never there. “The most important strategy was that I was never present on the set,” he says. “Sometimes I was much further away, sometimes I was nearer the set. But depending on the location and the scene that we were shooting, we would decide where I would be, at what distance I would be to the set that would allow me to direct it.” Were the authorities monitoring him? “Of course. The security agents and intelligence agents always follow you, but their ways of following have now changed. Nowadays, they follow you through your cellphones, through your bank cards, and through where you get gas, because in Iran you also have to buy gas with a certain card. Considering all that, I was very careful not to leave any traces behind.”
“Whenever I did have to leave my home,” he continues, “I would be very careful to be wearing some sort of disguise — like wearing gym clothes — and not letting anyone see me. I would be at a certain distance from my home, and then a car would come to pick me up and take me to my next destination. I was always very careful to see what was around me and if anyone was watching. What we did was quite close to what gangsters do, but I always felt like I had to keep my distance from the film crew. You should remember that I served in jail and in jail, I learned many things from gangsters.”
Given the very real possibility of being apprehended, the entire crew had fake scripts at all times. “There was always the risk that we would get arrested,” says Rasoulof, “and we had another script. That was Plan B. And as soon as anyone had a sense of danger, we would automatically switch to the other script and go to Plan B.”
So, what was the story in the other script? Don’t the Iranian authorities hate everything? Rasoulof laughs. “Actually, the Iranian authorities do love propaganda. So, based on the locations that we were in, we would come up with a story. One thing that might be useful for you to know is that we never appeared anywhere with a facade of making an actual feature film. We always pretended that we were making several short films. So, it always appeared as if we were making a film or a project for the state TV.”
Key to the film’s existence, he says, was “the process of editing. This was done by Andrew Bird, a friend of mine from another film that he had edited for me before. As we were shooting the film, we were also sending files for him to edit. For instance, we would shoot three or four days, and we would send him smaller-size files. He would get started on editing those files, and we would continue with the rest of the shoot.”
When he finally left Iran, Rasoulof went through a neighboring country, where he found asylum in the German consulate. “That’s when I started getting back to finishing the film,” he says. “That’s when I touched base with my friends. But everything was in the hands of the editor, and he had the responsibility to finish it.”
Rasoulof’s dramatic story paid off when his film won a Special Jury Prize in Cannes, but he has yet to come to terms with life as an Iranian emigré. “I have not reached that point yet,” he muses. “I’m not really realizing or understanding yet how things have changed because I’m constantly traveling, and I am in the gestational stage of being in exile. So, I first have to settle down and then I will figure out what the changes are.”
“But I just want to say this,” he adds. “For seven years I was banned from leaving Iran. Even when my film There is No Evil won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2020, I wasn’t able to be there. And then all of a sudden there is the exact contradiction. But at the same time, I’m constantly traveling. Sometimes I miss that sense of being in one place and that sense of… not quite stability, but, yeah, just staying in one place. I have to stop traveling first to be able to figure out how to work through the two contradictions.”
Was it worth it? He smiles. “Of course. Freedom is extraordinary. And I’m going to put it this way: If I’d stayed in Iran, I would be in jail right now, and a filmmaker in jail is a victim of censorship. I never wanted to play the role of a victim.”
