The Seed of the Sacred Fig

This Iranian film, shot entirely in secret, is about a family in Tehran during the recent uprising protesting the repressive regime there. The father in the film has recently ascended to the role of being a judge in the revolutionary courts and is charged with finding protestors guilty en masse. What I found most compelling about the film was its representation of the domestic sphere where the judge's wife and daughters are virtually confined by the regime to live out their lives. The near-adult daughters chafe against the restrictions imposed upon them while the mother tries to balance the impossible, conflicting demands between obedience to the regime and her daughter's desire for more freedom. In the film, the only, very limited freedom they have has been restricted to the small apartment they live in; in fact, less than that: just their bedroom of the daughters, as the living room and kitchen become sites of conflict with their parents. What interests me is the way the film represents the contraction of the world in an authoritarian regime: the only place where they can dress as they like, and express themselves, is in the apartment, but even that becomes limited. But in this sequestered space, the world breaks in in the heard protests in the streets, and with bloodied friends and with rumor and regime propaganda. To me, most powerfully, the film dramatizes the emotionally strangling dynamics of authoritarianism, its ever-increasing desire to contract the world to smaller and smaller spaces and to fill the void with loud hatred and ugly edicts towards anyone with different beliefs. We're not there in Trumps's America, but to me, you can see the aspiration in this administration towards that kind of control. Everywhere you turn now, there's the desire to eliminate difference, to abolish it or to exile it and to live in a state of mythological MAGA purity. Where? Increased book bannings, elimination of non-white history in the classroom and government (and non-government) websites, the attacks on liberal university education which have as its core exposure to different thoughts, ideas, literatures, histories--these are just a few examples. It's the emotionally-wearing noise, the loudness of the repeated pronouncements by the Iranian regime, the way it chips at the soul and seeks to paralyze with its ugly noise and sweeping pronouncements that struck me. Lots of people have written about the politics of authoritarianism. Few texts have captured the way it works to wear down the psychology and soul of individuals as powerfully as "The Seed of the Sacred Fig." Little surprise that Rasoulof, the director, and the cast, had to escape Iran to avoid harsh punishment.