Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Mohammad Rasoulof had crossed the Iranian border on foot into exile before the Tehran authorities got wind of his covertly shot new film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.In this domestic conspiracy thriller, which was nominated for an Oscar last week, a newly appointed judge rubber-stamps state executions in response to the 2022 protests sparked by the fatal beating of 22-year-old student Mahsa Amini by morality police. (The authorities claimed she died of a heart attack while in custody.) The judge’s suspicions about his own daughters’ activities provokes him to employ oppressive interrogation tactics in the family home. Meanwhile, Rasoulof weaves in phone-shot footage of the protests and police brutality posted online.Even before this latest act of resistance, the Cannes-prizewinning Iranian director was facing eight years in jail and a flogging for criticising previous government violence and for the content of films such as Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013) and A Man of Integrity (2017). He had already served seven months in jail from 2022 to 2023 and been under a travel ban since 2017 after being accused of “spreading propaganda against the Islamic government” in his work and “endangering national security”.His new film’s explicit critique of the regime feels like a decisive break with Iran, as if the young protesters’ boundless courage has further emboldened an already outspoken filmmaker. “The new generation does make me more courageous,” he tells me from Germany, where he is now based. “But the main aim was to keep working. I left Iran because I had to make this very cut-and-dried choice of going to prison for at least eight years, or to use these years I have left to live to make more films.”Rasoulof joins a growing wave of fine Iranian filmmakers inspired to defy state censorship only to be forced into exile or seclusion. Iran’s cinema seems rejuvenated by their honesty, even as its leading lights are punished. The psychological price of leaving was dramatised by Jafar Panahi in No Bears (2022), shot illicitly while the director was under a travel and filmmaking ban. Playing a version of himself remotely monitoring a shoot in Turkey from Iran, Panahi at one point finds himself standing on the border and flinches back to home turf as if burnt.Even last year’s gentle art-house hit My Favourite Cake drew the ire of authorities. The portrayal of an alcohol-drinking, dancing, privately hijab-free septuagenarian heroine doomed its co-directors (and spouses) Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha to a filmmaking and travel ban. “For the first time since the [1979] revolution we wanted to make a real version of life in Iran,” Moghaddam tells me from Tehran. “People have parties and drink alcohol at home, but outside we have to be the person [the authorities] want. This contrast is making us all crazy, because we can’t be ourselves. This is why we decided not to lie in this film, and to cross those red lines. These last three years [since Amini’s killing] have changed a lot here.” Remaining in Iran, even in internal exile, is therefore essential to them both. “The young generation has started a movement, and it’s our duty to be part of it.” The system is not monolithic, and is sometimes contradictory . . . At times it lets people let a bit of steam off to preserve itself in the longer run’For the moment, this condemns them to dreaming of films they can’t make. “Every day and every moment,” Sanaeeha sighs. “For our next scripts, we’re now doing the mises en scène, and thinking about the set decoration, the clothes and everything.”The Islamic Republic’s most successful directors, Asghar Farhadi and the late Abbas Kiarostami, have made cinema inside its red lines. The two-time Oscar-winning Farhadi focuses on novelistic studies weighing characters in a moral balance beyond politics, though he has angrily rejected accusations of a complicitous easy ride. “Art is such a wide world and we all have very different approaches,” Rasoulof says, diplomatically. “We also have very different relationships with power. But I don’t think there are any guidelines about how to make good art inside a regime.”Others opting to remain within the system work under a sword of Damocles. Saeed Roustaee’s pummelling, pungent police thriller Law of Tehran (2019), a domestic smash-hit, ends in a bleak, state-conducted mass hanging. The social critique of his follow-up Leila’s Brothers (2022) resulted in a prison sentence, but he is now working again. “It shows that the system is not monolithic, and sometimes contradictory and inefficient,” Rasoulof says. “At times it lets people let a bit of steam off to preserve itself in the longer run.”The public and private double-life explored in My Favourite Cake is central to Farahnaz Sharifi’s documentary My Stolen Planet. It combines Sharifi’s footage of hijab-free home dancing with painstakingly assembled archive footage of 1970s home movies of Iranian girls in western casual wear. History unfolds as Sharifi and her female documentarist friends film protests, and a passing goon suddenly smashes a camera. “There has always been an unofficial flow in Iranian cinema of especially women documentary filmmakers,” Sharifi tells me. “Recording images of private lives is an unofficial history for future generations.” Sharifi was in Germany when her home was raided and her precious archive destroyed, confirming for her the “nightmare” of exile. In her film she is nostalgic for a pre-revolutionary Iran that she has seen only in scratched home movies. A season this month at London’s Barbican, Masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave, shows the country’s rich cinema culture under the Shah. Ebrahim Golestan’s Brick and Mirror (1964) includes a long night-time scene in which a young woman and man eventually make love in his flat with a sense of precious private freedom still recognisable in the Iran of today. Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Chess of the Wind (1976) follows a decadent family in decline while living in a mansion oppressively submerged in sea green shadow like an abandoned ocean liner, foreshadowing the Shah’s fall.Most of the season’s films have been banned in Iran since 1979. What happened next may give pause to today’s exiles, says season curator Ehsan Khoshbakht. “The generation mostly moved abroad, and most of them never managed to work again,” he explains. “Those who did, lived extremely hard lives and could only make very small films.” Khoshbakht is a London-based exile himself, whose documentaries include Celluloid Underground (2023), in which he scours Tehran for banned pre-revolutionary reels. “I don’t see myself as an exiled filmmaker,” he says, “because I could only have made those films with this distance from Iran. The question of what you feel is urgent to film changes when you are inside or outside. The fact that there are so many Iranian filmmakers in exile is very sad, because you know about those who’ve been successful. I know God knows how many who are struggling.”Rasoulof doesn’t fear exile diminishing Iranian cinema now. “With the internet, even from outside Iran you have access to Iran, and for all these filmmakers working inside and outside, I see a luminous future. Once I’ve done the films I need to make [in Europe], I’m absolutely certain that I shall return,” he concludes. “If it means I go to prison, I will accept it. I’ve paid those consequences before.”‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ is in UK cinemas from February 7. ‘My Favourite Cake’ is on Curzon Home Cinema. ‘My Stolen Planet’ is showing at Bertha DocHouse, London. ‘Masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave’ is at the Barbican, London, February 4-25, barbican.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
