About a half an hour before the start of my conversation with exiled Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, he gets tragic news from his home country.
Kianush Sanjari, a journalist and activist who he’d spent time with in prison, has committed suicide by jumping off a building. “He perceived his body as his only weapon of protest,” the visibly upset director tells me via an interpreter while sitting in the empty restaurant of a West Hollywood hotel.
He takes a moment to compose himself. I ask him if we should reschedule, but he decides to continue with the interview. Pushing through the unthinkable has become a necessity.
Over the years, Rasoulof, 52, had been a recurrent target of Iranian authorities because of the content of his movies, which denounce the Islamic government’s violent repression, permeating all aspects of life for its citizens. Since 2010, he’s been convicted several times, banned from making films and has spent multiple stints behind bars.
To avoid a recent eight-year jail sentence that included a flogging, Rasoulof fled Iran in May after the regime demanded he pull his latest hard-hitting drama, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which he filmed in secret, from the Cannes Film Festival, where it had been chosen to compete. He refused to comply and took off.
After a treacherous journey through an undisclosed route over the mountains on foot, followed by multiple stops over the course of 28 days, he eventually made it to safety in Germany. His movie is now that country’s Oscar entry for international feature.
Rasoulof, who today holds German travel documents, was profoundly touched by the German committee’s decision to select his film. “They simply chose to listen to the world,” he says. “It’s a huge gesture of support for all filmmakers who are working under duress.”
In “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” set amid the real-life 2022 protests sparked by the death of young student Mahsa Amini while in police custody, the corrosive rule of the Iranian state divides a family across ideological lines. Asked by the government to serve as an investigating judge, Iman (Missagh Zareh), a lawyer, is forced to sign off on death sentences. Plugged into the unrest via social media, his two young adult daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), refuse to remain silent.
“In the last 15 years I’ve had very much to do with interrogators, the censors, the judicial system and the security apparatus of Iran,” Rasoulof says. “And I saw commonalities among all of these different people. What they all shared is their submission to power.”
It was the experience of making his debut feature, 2002’s “The Twilight,” that ignited Rasoulof’s career-long commitment to dissident art. That film, a docufiction about a prison inmate who marries while still serving his sentence, featured people playing themselves, re-creating the real situations they experienced.
During that shoot, Rasoulof spent a few days living in prison with his actors, never imagining he would return as a convict himself a few years later. “I might be the only filmmaker who’s experienced so many different ways of being in prison,” he says with a laugh. “Not only as an observer, but also as an actual prisoner. They’re quite different.”
At the time, Rasoulof, then in his late 20s, still believed that his work could spur a meaningful dialogue at home. “The Twilight” earned him the only award he’s ever received in Iran from the preeminent Fajr International Film Festival. As his original stories began to take on the system more overtly, however, their public exhibition was prohibited.
“I just thought I was a critic who could help everything improve, that I could show through my films what I was seeing and that those in power would be affected and start changing things,” he recalls. “But as I got closer to the end of that film, I realized how naïve I was, because structural power can be so much stronger than individual will.”
A line of dialogue from his 2011 drama “Goodbye,” about an Iranian woman desperately trying to leave the country, might be interpreted as Rasoulof’s own sentiment: “When one is a stranger in one’s own country, it is better to be a stranger in a foreign land.”
He tells me he doesn’t identify with that impulse.
“My daily life was full of empathy, because I only saw [people] I thoroughly selected,” Rasoulof says. “But I know lots of people who, in order to make ends meet, don’t have this luxury. Therefore, their life is much more violent.”
Distrust among the Iranian people, instilled by the regime, is a key tactic to maintaining its grip. “It separates people, it destroys protest movements and it comes at no cost at all for them,” says “Sacred Fig” actor Maleki via interpreter on a Zoom call alongside her co-star Rostami.
In the wake of the Mahsa Amini demonstrations, both actors — like their director, exiled in Europe — decided to no longer take part in projects that required them to wear Iran’s compulsory hijab. “If I am to act in only one film in my life, it better be something that I really believe in,” Maleki adds.
Casting actors to make a film in secret (at the risk of jail time or worse) is no trivial task. The strategies he employs, Rasoulof says, are akin to those employed by drug traffickers. “Of course, we were only smuggling human values,” he says half-jokingly, still amused to be put in that position.
First, one of his colleagues would ring up a potential performer and take the temperature by saying: “We’re working on this short film and some aspects will not be quite in compliance. If you take part, you might get harassed a bit. What do you think?” They would proceed based on their response. Rasoulof has become very good at identifying fellow freethinkers.
“Being a gangster of a certain experience since I’ve been to prison, I know who I can talk to,” he says, relishing his defiant status.
I mention it’s endearing that he is able to mine humor from these ordeals. “There’s no other way to keep going,” Rasoulof replies.
Even once people were vetted and on board, the production couldn’t let its guard down. “Setareh and I both read the script before we started the shoot, but because of the security conditions, we were not allowed to take the script home with us, ever,” recalls Rostami.
“Two people who eventually became part of the crew told me that they initially thought [the film] was a ruse devised by the regime to discover who wanted to work in underground cinema,” remembers Rasoulof. “Then my negotiator told me that he didn’t trust those same two crew members. He thought we shouldn’t bring them on because they were a risk.”
Loyalty was paramount. A loyal person who didn’t yet know exactly what they were doing was more valuable than a seasoned professional whom they couldn’t trust. Though Rasoulof admits he’s had to sacrifice artistic quality at times, he’s willing to pay that price.
“Being able to deflect censorship has its own value,” he says. “I had two choices: either not to make films, because I had no interest in making them under the dictates of censors, or make films this way.”
Rasoulof has no doubts that his film, which won a special jury prize at Cannes, will find its way to Iranian audiences through social media apps like Telegram. He encourages it, but he does mind the way it’s screened. “I just request people kindly don’t watch it on a mobile phone, but to make sure that they’ve got a nice big screen they can watch it on,” he says, smiling.
On the recent U.S. presidential elections, Rasoulof says that at least here, people have “the choice to choose this dark time, as long as those who choose the dark time are the majority, however slim.”
In Iran, conversely, a small minority has taken the whole country hostage, leaving the population with “no choice on whether to choose its own darkness or not.”
The good news for Americans, he thinks, is that, hopefully, the Trump administration will only last a limited time, and the possibility to choose better in the future still remains. That right to self-determination and to amend or make mistakes is absent in Iran.
“For Iranians at the moment, the only hope is that another power may help us from outside,” he says. “Because the Islamic Republic, first and foremost, represses its own people.”
During this uncertain chapter in his life — doing Hollywood interviews as a fugitive — Rasoulof revels in a newfound normalcy he’d never encountered before, derived from seemingly insignificant things.
“In Iran, whenever I was about to open the door to leave the house, I’d take a deep breath, and think, ‘There might be people outside to take you away,’” he recalls. “Now I never have to worry about this when I open my door, and that gives me great joy.”
That sense of safety, however, comes at a great emotional cost, familiar to anyone who’s been uprooted from a place they once knew. “I adore Iran and its culture,” he says. “That’s the place where I got to know life, where I got to know what humanity means. It’s the window I was granted onto the world.”
Away from their home country, Rasoulof’s brave artists find solace in one another, holding on to hope for a new dawn in Iran.
“For me, home now is us standing together in solidarity as human beings and not leaving one another alone,” Maleki says, wiping tears from her face. “For me, home means being able to send a message to someone and say, ‘Come and have some tea with me.’”
In the world that Rasoulof still believes can exist, that invitation will one day lead them back to Iran.
