Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.If cinema changed anything, they’d make it illegal. In the UK, that is just a riff on an old joke about voting. In Iran, a movie like The Seed of the Sacred Fig really is an uprising. “This film was made in secret,” a title card tells us. Production began in 2023, following the street protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the Tehran morality police. In dramatic tribute, director Mohammad Rasoulof has released an indictment of the regime that also plays like a crackling domestic thriller.Yet it opens with the promise of good times. After years of toil, diligent lawyer Iman (Missagh Zareh) has at last won a post at the Revolutionary Court. The news is welcomed by wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and teenage daughters Rezvan and Sana (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki). For them, the promotion brings the prospect of a bigger apartment — with separate bedrooms. Through such mundane trades, the film suggests, tyrannies tick on.Still, Iman struggles with the reality of the job, dismayed to be told to sign death sentences without even reading the evidence. (This might be the movie’s weak spot: the regime lawyer as shockable innocent.) But the story will focus too on Najmeh, Rezvan and Sana — two generations of Iranian women in a system built for brutal men.The interplay between conservative mother, sombre older sister and brash younger one is vivid. Cracks in the family unit open with feminist protests in earshot of the apartment. The movie stays indoors. The symbolism is powerful, but also, of course, to do with the illicit nature of the shoot. The claustrophobia is political.Iman will soon seek to assert control of his private patriarchy. The story has the air of fable, but plays bold games with convention. A gun appears early, before a dark, droll twist on the usual Chekhovian logic. Rather than reappear, it vanishes.Scenes from the actual protests of 2022 and 2023 feature through the film, whose existence in turn had real-world consequence. Last spring, once the regime became aware of it, Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison. Now, it has been nominated for a Best International Feature Film Oscar — entered by Germany, to which the director fled into exile with some of the cast and crew. Given the stakes, The Seed of the Sacred Fig would be admirable even if it weren’t such a very fine film. But it is.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from February 7 and in US cinemas now
