The Seed of the Sacred Fig: Political Critique Film in the TikTok Era

The Iranian film The Seed of the Sacred Fig became one of the standout hits at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Initially added to the competition lineup as a latecomer, it faced a challenging screening schedule, slotted on the festival’s penultimate day when juries and media were already weary.

Despite these unfavorable conditions, Sacred Fig managed to spark the festival's final crescendo: a 15-minute standing ovation following its credits, a gesture of respect for exiled director Mohammad Rasoulof and his courageous team.

Within 24 hours, the film had emerged as a strong contender for the Palme d’Or—though we know how it turned out. Ultimately, it was the late-blooming American independent filmmaker Sean Baker and his Anora who clinched the top prize.

Sacred Fig was left with a jury’s special prize, a somewhat consolatory acknowledgment. This seemed to reflect the jury’s stance, led by Greta Gerwig: the political and social significance of Sacred Fig was undeniable, but that was where its merits ended. When it came to cinematic excellence, the film seemed to fall short.

So, was the jury’s decision justified? After watching Sacred Fig, I must concede that Gerwig and her fellow jurors had a point. While the film’s social significance as a high-risk project cannot be overstated, as a cinematic work, Sacred Fig is inconsistent and incoherent, failing to meet the basic standards of narrative filmmaking—despite its sprawling 168-minute runtime.

A Fractured Narrative and Misaligned Focus

The film opens with a classic moral dilemma: Iman, a recently promoted judicial investigator at Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, is pressured to sign a death penalty indictment for a young man in his twenties—without reviewing the case files. This predicament naturally draws empathy from the audience and sets up a compelling story. Faced with the choice between securing a bright future for his family and following his conscience, Iman becomes a lens through which the film could explore systemic complicity, the "banality of evil," and the Kafkaesque plight of small officials in a vast bureaucratic machine.

Yet, astonishingly, Iman all but disappears from the story for the next 40 minutes. His occasional two-minute appearances are relegated to complaining about work or offering lukewarm reassurances to his wife about their two teenage daughters, contributing neither to the narrative nor his character development.

During this stretch, the focus shifts to his wife, Najmeh, and their daughters, Rezvan and Sana, who take center stage. The family engages in heated debates about the Mahsa Amini protests, the actions of the police, and the government’s (false) official narrative. Their conflicts temporarily subside when one of the daughters' friends is injured by police, and Najmeh tends to the wounded protester.

This segment places the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests at its heart. The daughters constantly scroll through social media, where visceral, real-time footage from the protests fills their screens. Director Rasoulof magnifies these vertical smartphone videos to full-screen, creating an immersive documentary-fiction hybrid aesthetic.

Just as the film seems to have embraced this stylistic shift, it veers again into unexpected territory. The protests recede from view, and Iman reclaims narrative dominance, driven this time by a contrived plot twist: he loses his court-issued gun. The consequences of this mishap threaten to ruin his career, prompting him to suspect everyone in his family. He subjects them to interrogations by intelligence agents, eventually confining them and treating them like prisoners. The narrative culminates in a The Shining-style hide-and-seek sequence that finally resolves the plot.

A Disjointed Allegory Wrapped in Genre Tropes

The latter half of the film morphs into an allegory cloaked in genre elements. Iman becomes a symbol of authoritarian power, while Najmeh and the daughters represent varying responses to oppression. This metaphorical battle unfolds within a Hanekesque vacuum of tension and dread. But in a jarring tonal shift, the film also injects Hollywood-style car chases complete with a pulsating score, leaving the viewer perplexed.

This lack of stylistic and tonal unity is just one of Sacred Fig’s problems. The inconsistencies and contradictions in character development make the story feel implausible. Iman begins as a conscientious, idealistic public servant torn by his moral dilemma, but after losing his gun, he transforms into a ruthless patriarch willing to sacrifice his family for his career. This stark reversal is neither believable nor earned.

Similarly, Najmeh starts as a staunch defender of traditional values, micromanaging her daughters’ lives, but softens after encountering the injured protester, expressing sympathy for the movement. Yet after being interrogated, she inexplicably aligns with her husband, even manipulating her younger daughter into betraying her sister with the promise of permission to dye her hair.

A Fragmented Film for the TikTok Era

The bizarre result of Sacred Fig underscores an important lesson: journalism, allegory, and genre filmmaking are three distinct realms. While they may intersect, successfully navigating their intersections requires extraordinary narrative and thematic control. Rasoulof’s attempt to have it all achieves little. This critique only scratches the surface; a deeper ethical examination of whether the Mahsa Amini protests should be aestheticized or fictionalized would likely render Rasoulof’s approach even more tenuous.

To be fair, there are mitigating circumstances. Making a film like Sacred Fig in Iran undoubtedly involves significant logistical challenges, and Rasoulof’s history of house arrest and imprisonment likely impacted his creative process.

Still, unlike his compatriot Jafar Panahi, Rasoulof seems not to have grasped the principle that “less is more.” Conveying the constraints of a repressive system through the film’s form and structure can be an equally powerful political and aesthetic statement. This is a lesson Sacred Fig, in its pursuit of breadth, fails to learn.

Perhaps Sacred Fig’s flaws reflect the influence of the short-form, TikTok-driven age. I have no doubt that isolated dramatic scenes from the film, paired with captions like “Husband makes a mistake; entire family pays the price” or “11 tips for women to outsmart abusive men,” would gain traction on platforms like TikTok. But these moments fail to coalesce into a cohesive whole—perhaps because, in Rasoulof’s eyes, they don’t need to.

While I cannot definitively answer these questions, I know which films tell similar stories with greater narrative coherence and thematic depth. Works like Panahi’s or other recent Iranian films, such as last year’s Terrestrial Verses (premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes) or this year’s My Stolen Planet (premiered in Panorama section of Berlin Film Festival), exhibit a stronger command of cinematic language, narrative focus, and humility when addressing delicate subjects. These qualities distinguish thoughtful filmmakers from those who rely on spectacle—and, regrettably, it seems the latter often receive more recognition, even if limited, in recent years.