Making almost any movie is such a substantial, demandingly collective endeavor, it’s hard to grasp the concept of one being made “in secret.” Yet somehow that has been the case with a number of films made in recent years within and about Iran—a nation whose acclaimed cinematic new wave has been going on for decades now, but which is arguably now better known for banning films than producing them.
Its makers gain international recognition and collect festival awards at their peril, if the work in question offends government watchdogs. Threatened with prison, house arrest and/or simply withdrawal of permission to practice their craft, some directors and their collaborators have fled the country. More have simply, effectively been silenced. A few have taken advantage of technology’s advances (god knows you can do a lot with a cellphone camera these days) to surreptitiously continue doing what they do.
Prominent among the latter group is Mohammad Rasoulof, whose new The Seed of the Sacred Fig is not his first movie to be made undercover, so to speak. When it was selected to compete at Cannes this spring, he was sentenced to flogging and eight years’ incarceration—so he scrammed to, at present, Germany. (He had already been subject to earlier imprisonments, and travel and work bans.)
In a sense, you can’t blame Iranian officials for their Draconian response. Where most prior dissident expressions on their native screens were cautiously limited to metaphor, symbolism, and suggestion in cryptic or seemingly innocuous narratives, Seed is a damningly explicit political critique. No matter how much protective secrecy surrounded its production, you can’t help but be amazed he got away with making it at all.
Residing in a high-rise Tehran apartment is a fairly prosperous family of middle-aged parents with two daughters rapidly entering adulthood. But such is the risk around father Iman’s (Missagh Zareh) job, his children don’t even know what he does for a living. He is, in fact, an “investigating judge” in Iran’s questionable Revolutionary Court system, where anyone perceived as a threat—whether real or imaginary—to the powers that be can easily find themselves railroaded on some dubious charge. A devout man, he’s trying to maintain judicial and personal integrity. But there is pressure on him to sign a death indictment that may be unjust, perhaps not for the first time, and the price of refusal could be severe.
Meanwhile, offspring Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki) chafe under their household’s own strictures. While Iman and loyal wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) privately confess doubts about the government’s rigid, reactionary policies, to their daughters they offer a united front of conservative conformism. The girls have phones, though—they cannot be kept completely blind to what’s going on outside.
This story commencing in late 2022, protests are breaking out against the regime, particularly its arrests and beatings of citizens for trivial infractions. Though she still lives at home, Rezvan attends university, where the campus becomes a hotbed of dissent. She and the younger Sana are often glued to communications from the former’s classmate Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), who is taking an active role in this public resistance. They have to hide any such knowledge from their parents, though that becomes near-impossible as violence escalates against demonstrators… to Sadaf’s grief.
At the same time, Imam is anonymously threatened with exposure as a judicial tool of the state’s sometimes lethal whims. He brings home a gun for protection, and the last shred of domestic tranquility vanishes when it goes missing. Eventually the whole family hits the road in a panic. What had hitherto been a psychological thriller of sorts turns into a physical one, complete with squealing tires, full-on paranoia, and the eventual firing of that gun.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is nearly three hours long, but tense and engrossing enough that time fairly flies by. If plausibility occasionally flags, characters nonetheless remain credible in overreactions that end up exaggerating divisions between them. They are flawed, well-intentioned individuals who fall prey to the warped realities of authoritarianism, in which the assumption of moral righteousness can so easily bend to accommodate punitive harm.
The nuclear unit here becomes a microcosm of a larger system whose ever-tighter control may result in struggle, suffocation, or both. While limited largely in scale to the protagonists’ apartment, it’s still extraordinary that this film got made in present-day Iran, with or without official permission. The fictional elements are indicting enough—but what really jolts are the frequent doses of real-life cameraphone footage depicting citizens being being roughed up, shot at, or dragged away in broad daylight by their own government’s goons. At presstime, Seed was scheduled to open this Fri/13 only at SF’s AMC Kabuki complex.
Also pushing some political hot buttons are a couple documentaries releasing this week to streaming platforms. Alexis Bloom’s The Bibi Files is an excoriating look at Israel’s long-term prime minister that uses the “give ‘em enough rope” method of letting his own words do the hanging. Facing the latest in an endless series of corruption scandals, Benjamin Netanyahu is seen here responding to his investigators’ questions with a mixture of the vague, dismissive, amnesiac and irate. Wife Sara, infamous for her pursuit of luxury “gifts” from diplomats and others, evades answering entirely by sticking to variations on “How dare you!” Son Yair is clearly a chip off the old block, berating the media’s “radical Marxist agenda” while blithely sidestepping all direct accusations of power abuse and graft.
The Netanyahus have flourished for so long, weathering so many scandals (even as other officials got duly imprisoned for accepting bribes and other violations of law), that the film’s principal journalistic voice Raviv Drucker believes they think themselves immune. Yet, not unlike a certain incoming POTUS, they retain an iron grip on power partly for legitimate fear of going to jail—while protesting they are the innocent victims of a “whole industry working to incriminate” them. “Bibi” has the world-class pokerface of someone who long ago stopped viewing lies as something bad, rather than a simple, everyday expedience.
Repentant former colleagues are interviewed; even the late Sheldon Adelson is heard politely distancing himself from a longtime ally who may’ve exceeded his own formidable tolerance for shamelessness. It’s suggested that Israel’s dynamic with Palestinians may have gotten worse simply because a “forever war” provides the kind of concerning chaos that can keep a despot in charge for keeps. Did the PM “feed the beast” by channeling “suitcases of money” to Hamas, indirectly funding the terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians last fall? Has his pursuit of “total victory” and resistance to negotiation (including release of hostages) been part of that long game, heedless of the cost in human lives? Those are among the scathing questions raised in these Files, which is duly banned in Israel because its police footage was leaked.
The parallels to our own political situation are plentiful: A leader with a lavish lifestyle whose courting of far-right extremists has brought some of the country’s “most reviled figures” into mainstream political power—fascists, violent racists, theocrats, et al. One who seeks to control the press and judiciary for self-protection, who dismisses protest in jingoistic cliches and who (despite reportedly having a photographic memory) miraculously forgets any association that has grown problematic. This is a repellent but fascinating portrait that is all too relevant for U.S. viewers, whatever turn our policies in the Middle East take in coming months. Not booked yet for any Bay Area theaters, The Bibi Files is available for streaming on Jolt.film as of Wed/11.
A more meditative examination of past injustices on an international scale is provided by French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop’s Dahomey, a short, essayistic treatment of a major event in the present-day Republic of Benin. When that West African land was a French “protectorate” for nearly a century, ending in 1960, its colonists freely channeled historic artifacts to private collections and public institutions in Europe. Recently twenty-six pieces (out of an estimated 7000) were repatriated back to Benin from a museum in Paris. Their arrival occasioned both festivities and a lot of national self-examination.
Much of this 68-minute feature is occupied by heated debate amongst university students on whether this return is a cause for celebration or an “insult,” given the paltry number of items returned. Is it wrong to keep these objects of primarily religious intent placed in museums, themselves a Western construct? What do they mean now in terms of cultural identity, colonialist history, and so forth?
Diop (who began her career as an actress, notably starring in Claire Denis’ wonderful 35 Shots of Rum in 2008) adds a more fanciful angle by having the film narrated by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, who voices “#26”—a statue of Ghezo, King of Dahomey from 1818 to 1858. This movie, too, is an objet d’art that comments on itself, seeking not to explain or absolve so much as to stir dialogue about the complex issues it touches on. Dahomey is available for streaming on arthouse platform MUBI as of Fri/13.
