Iranian Rebellion

 “The Seed of the Sacred Fig," film directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, 2025

This film was done in secret and its director is now in exile in Germany.  It is a parable about the oppression of women, and many others, in Iranian society, but compressed into the life of a single family.  The title supposedly comes from an Iranian saying about a fig vine that strangles other living plants.  In this case, the ‘seed’ of this fig is clearly theocracy.  The film has its roots in the 2022 protests that started with the murder of Mahsa Amini by the Morality Police over her hijab.  The film includes real footage of these protests as supposedly seen by the principal characters, usually filmed on an iPhone.

Fraught discussion at the dinner table

The family is the father, Iman, who is promoted to a judgeship in a ‘Revolutionary’ Court in Tehran.  His job is to sign death warrants and prison sentences given him by higher ups without any investigation as to innocence or guilt, which bothers him.  But he does it because it will come with a higher salary and a bigger, better apartment.  He is also gifted a gun to defend himself. Iman, like is wife Najmeh, are on board with the promotion, as they are very observant Muslims and believe everything the government does is the ‘will of God’ – including the hijab ban.  Their two daughters, Rezvan and Sana, are not so sure.

Iman unfortunately gets this job right at the start of the protests, so he is in court all day and part of the night ‘processing’ protesters.  The issue that begins to break the family is a student friend of Rezvan gets sprayed in the eye by buckshot while in her dorm or at a protest.  Najmeh supports the police actions, but also nurses this girl in secret because her daughter brings her to the apartment.  The parents want the girl out of the apartment and she is later arrested and disappeared.  Both Iman and Najmeh warn the children not to back the protests or go out in the streets. We hear chants of “Death to the Theocracy” and “Women, Life, Freedom” under their windows and later see women waving headscarves in the air.

Rezvan argues with her parents about the protests and feminism and somehow Iman’s gun disappears from his drawer too.  He is intensely suspicious of his daughters, thinking they took the gun, and sends them to a fellow police interrogator. He is given another gun by his boss.  His name and address is then posted on the internet as a criminal judge and the family flees to a run-down, empty town in the hills.  From here the film becomes a horror story, as the girls and later the mother fear Iman’s rage over their refusal to tell him where the gun went.  Inman locks them up in rooms as ‘liars,’ as the women try to protect each other.  The first gun appears – hidden by little sister Sana - who escapes, then frees the others.  Iman chases the three of them around the shabby ruins with his gun until he corners Sana and, after a shot, falls through a crumbling roof to his death. 

This is a parable of how a family dominated by a religious, state-tied father is similar to the whole of Iranian society run by a council of violent male mullahs and a ‘Supreme” Leader.  Women play the role of a key revolutionary contingent in this battle.

For the geo-political, non-Marxist pod-casters and liberal cultural relativists, Iran and the hijab are heroic examples of the ‘battle against imperialism.’  And indeed Iran has been subject to war and invasion from Iraq, endless U.S. sanctions, threats, bombings by Israel, dropped nuclear treaties, a U.S. backed Pahlavi dictatorship and more.  Yet it is not the U.S. that will liberate the Iranian people from theocratic capitalism, it will be the Iranian working class, peasants and minorities who will do it, in alliance with others in the region. ‘Anti-imperialists’ who support theocracy by opposing popular internal movements against U.S. ‘enemies’ are actually the real enemies of the working class in the Middle East.  This film is an excellent historical and social document of that struggle. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Iran,” “feminism.”

Kultur Kommissar / March 11, 2025