In The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a dick of a dad chooses country over family in a sobering and ultimately dark peek inside Iran’s twisted moral curtain. Shot in secret and ultimately responsible for the director’s exile, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a powerful if overly long drama-thriller mixed with real footage of bloody protests, beatings, and murders.
Iran is well known for a lot of things, including its treatment of women and headscarf laws. Writer/director Mohammad Rasoulaf presents a compelling premise: what if an investigating judge responsible for putting “immorals” in jail (or worse) had two modern daughters who thought the laws were bullshit?
Rasoulaf’s take on how that would go down is not a positive one.
What starts as a pretty standard drama spirals into something much more disturbing, an examination of how some people become so mired in their beliefs they’ll do anything to hold onto them–even if it means turning on your family.
With strong acting and an excellent script, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an engrossing movie. For a while. At two hours and 48 minutes long, this drama is just a beast of a movie, and I’m not entirely sure why it’s so long. It’s not slow, but its pacing does begin to feel long in the tooth as the story plods along. Some tighter editing would have gone a long way to take The Seed of the Sacred Fig from good to great.
Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.