THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG

I don't know which is more remarkable - this film or that it got made at all.

It's about an Iranian family and the consequences for them of the protests of 2022-23.

The head of the household Iman is a judge who has just been promoted which means more money and a bigger apartment.  There are a few downsides though.

The first is that the job requires him to issue death sentences without him being able to exercise his own judgment.  This problem of course gets worse when the court becomes  inundated with arrests once the protests are in full swing. 

Iranian judges aren't popular so he needs to keep a low profile, so low that his own two daughters don't seem to know much about what he does.  Then again they scarcely interact with him at all given that he comes home after they have gone to bed and leaves for work early in the morning.  This again is a problem that only gets worse when the protests get into their stride.

Upon his promotion he is issued with a gun for self protection which he keeps in a bedroom drawer.  This turns out to be Chekhov's Gun on steroids.

Once the protests start it is natural that the two daughters are following it on social media.  The elder Rezvan who is 21 is old enough to be questioning whether the nightly news can be trusted and anyway what is so wrong about peaceful protest?  Her younger sibling Sana is more of a dark horse.

The mother Najmeh is in a difficult position.  She supports the status quo and is subservient to her husband, and of course doesn't want her daughters to get caught up in the protests.  This is easier said than done when a friend of Rezvan is badly injured during a rally and then gets arrested.  Najmeh feels obliged to go behind her husband's back to try to find out what has become of her.

The drama really takes off when Iman's gun disappears.  Did he lose it somewhere outside the apartment or did one of his daughters take it?  It's a potentially catastrophic development because if the court finds out he will be imprisoned and can say goodbye to his career.  

Understandably desperate, Iman (supported initially by Najmeh) takes the extreme step of getting one of the state interrogators to question all three members of his family.  Although the interrogator has the reputation for being very skilled we see in fact that he's quite useless, which I took to be a sideswipe at the Iranian state's disregard for the truth.  

When the family's address and Iman's face appears on social media the family flees for safety to Iman's birthplace out in the country.  This might be an opportunity for Iman to try to repair his relationship with his daughters but instead he tries to turn interrogator himself which only leads events to spiral wildly out of control in a disastrous way.

It's all totally gripping, and superbly performed. 

However I do have one major issue which is that the revelation as to how the gun disappeared, which after all is the key event in the film, is unsatisfactory in that it is never explained.

Even so this is a must-see film.  In it's own extraordinary way it's a savage indictment of the regime but also of course rather depressing given that the protests came to nothing.  The film includes actual footage of the protests which show the brutality of how they were repressed.  At the very end there's footage which shows the joyful, liberating side of the protests when they started, very much a bittersweet way to conclude.

RATING: ✓✓ Good Times