Many festivalgoers thought that Seeds of the Wild Fig tree would pull his pin from the game to win the gold palm in a quality Cannoese selection, but without heavyweights, in comparison with the previous edition. Presented in competition, Mohammad Rasoulof's latest feature film, however, had great advantages. This feature film puts us at the heart of an Iranian family affected by the beginnings of the resistance movement. Women Life Freedom. In a Tehran on the verge of implosion, the father, a judge investigating the regime, discovered that his service weapon had disappeared. The family will gradually dislodge to find the culprit.
Critique - Seeds of the Wild Fig tree
The seeds of anger
In exile, the dissident filmmaker of the Islamic Republic of Iran arrived in Cannes just in time to present his film. Sentenced to eight years in prison, whipping, a heavy fine, coupled with the confiscation of his property, Rasoulof Had to choose between incarceration and exile. Until the last moment, the Cannes festival was in anticipation of the participation of the Iranian director now targeted by the mullahs. The emotion was therefore palpable during the first time we were able to attend the Grand Theatre. When the lights went out, some people could hear the slogan « Death of the dictator ».
For its history, Rasoulof chose the setting of a family this upper middle class and which is torn apart after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini. A 22-year-old Kurdish girl who was eliminated on 16 September 2022, she had been beaten by the Iranian customs police for a wick of hair that exceeded her hijab. Faithful to the historical chronological process in which each day the situation became more and more explosive, the director gives body to his account by these events systematically reported out of the field. People are thus heard shouting out their support for the movement as evidenced by the many videos of these windows that became so many political spaces at night.
We immediately see the situation swelling with a clear split between adults and young people, the former being bottled on television, while the latter were awakened by the numerous videos circulating on social networks via VPN interposed. The Iranian diaspora (which is said to be the most educated in the world) is caught up between an implacable regime and a modern and technological youth (or even the country report on this subject). This changing religious youth was struck by a shock wave Women Life Freedom.
In the autumn of 2022 it was first high schools, universities and student dormitories that ignited after violence videos flooded social networks. In his book Women Life Freedom, the anthropologist Chowra Makaremi traces this newspaper of a revolt by reproducing an eloquent image that would accurately apply to Rasoulof's film: « The jugular, vital vein of the neck, is the physiological place of anger in Persian: to say outrage, it is said of a person that she has the jugular which inflates ». These swollen jugulars, this soda anger of women proudly displaying their hair; This is a change from an irreversible process. She adds:
« The revolution is closer to power than the vein of its neck, already touched »
Communicable fear has many facets. First of all the obvious one of insurgents who risk summary execution or, « at best », to be victims of the persecutions of Basidjis, militia in charge of internal and external security of the country and ruthless branch of the guards of the revolution. But fear is reversible. And those who oppress are also targets for the eruptive Iranian youth. Through the double-edged power of the images, rioters are hunted and questioned by investigators like Iman, the father of the family promoted and quickly caught up with the grip of the prosecutors, for whom he must sign the acts of imprisonment without objection. This deaf fear was already seen at work in Tehran Law to the highest levels of the police (read our critical).
When he loses his service weapon, he accuses his own children. Fear takes on a paranoid color and it infiltrates into the intimacy of the home. Najmeh, the mother of Rezvan and Sana, is drawn between following her husband or believing her daughters. But the revolution is an inevitable process that weaves its canvas everywhere and all the time: in the street, on television, on mobile phones, so that screens become so many windows on the real. Drinking images, Iranians see the regime's propaganda break up and two worlds break up. This is what Rasoulof questions with his film by exposing raw and authentic images of iconic videos that circulated all over the world: those of the first murders or those of the abuses committed by the police in dormitories where young people were defeated manu militari. Rasoulof makes us live from within the premises of the revolution.
A trigger of the film, one of Sana's friends, the eldest of siblings, is disfigured after receiving chevrotin at close range. This is how the mother is indirectly involved in the movement. Women Life Freedom, as she resolves to treat as she can the face of the poor child. It is this contagion of the revolt that makes all the strength of the Wild fig seed. It is this revolution in revolution through the broken home.
Revolution in the Revolution
It must be understood that the place of women is essential in triggering the events that followed the burial of Jina Mahsa Amini. If in the West the veil is a matter (under the cover of secularism) of obsessions with Islamophobic relents, the question is never asked in these terms in the Iranian theocracy and more generally in the Arab world (read Article on the veil and its prejudices by Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifa). Iranian women have no sense of hostility towards the veil as such, which is why veiled protesters also participated in the riots. All these women who trampled or burned their veil in public did so to denounce patriarchal society, not the veil as such. If this tissue became obligatory after the Iranian revolution of 1979, it is because it is a logic of control by the body mullahs who no longer belong to women. In the logic of fundamentalists, women must be protected from femicides and violence to which they expose themselves by revealing their bodies, regardless of whether they are opposed.
As Chowra Makaremi shows in his book, « dignity is a fundamental characteristic of our humanity of which we are only the custodians and the State the guarantor ». Irony of the demonstration, it is exactly the same reasoning applied in France by the judges, during the famous Morsang judgment on Barley. The European Court of Human Rights for the first time defined the concept of human dignity by prohibiting the use of... Dwarf throw! Even though the small man was willing to earn his living in the bistros, this choice does not belong to him. Mullahs, on the other hand, have a variable geometry reading of what dignity should be.
This rejection of the wearing of veil by contempt therefore becomes, in a dictatorship, the allegory of the struggle against the oppression of the regime. More than a feminist movement, Women Life Freedom is carried and supported by women as well as by some of the men. The movement turns towards a social revolution. Women Life Freedom becomes the organ of the revolt to redefine the living conditions of life itself. When Jina's funeral turned into a wild demonstration, it was the « Judge of power » which was targeted, resumes Chowra Makaremi. Since sailing or not should be one of the first freedoms, it becomes the symbol par excellence of regime control over public space as the intimate sphere. Repression becomes the political solution. In the film, girls and mother are never veiled at home. Rasoulof does not hesitate to remove this hypocrisy during a tricky sequence where the parents promise the little girl that she can varnish her nails and even dye her hair in blue if she denounces her sister.
Positive point for Rasoulof's film, The Seeds of the Sacred Fig Never fall into the Western trap too frequent of the stigmatization of the veil, automatically assimilated to the submission of women. A neocolonial bias that doesn't have to be. This paradox of controlling the bodies is now tearing up Iranian society. We already saw it very well in films like the excellent Nights of Mashhad, thrilling thriller from real facts and directed by Ali Abassi. In this feature film, a serial killer rapes and eliminates prostitutes in Mashhad, the holy city of the Ayatollah and the country's most religious bastion. His trial gave rise to a powerful national solidarity movement, not for the victims but for the help of this criminal who cleaned the streets of the city of the impurity of these sex workers. The murderer took the figure of a quasi-prophetist, armed arm of God on Earth. The film was a heartbreak on the transmission of mortifying values by fundamentalism and religious fanaticism. Again, the victims are paradoxically blamed for the crimes of men. « It's his fault. » Let go of the mother to her daughters when she talks about their friend disfigured by the police.
Fear has two faces
As the first arguments between Sana and her parents during a tense meal show, the older generation repeats the well-known argument of the association between depravity and the rejection of the veil. This scene becomes the occasion for a vibrant plea for freedom and a surgical demonstration of the aberration of the speech of the mullahs. But where Rasoulof's film is a success, it is that he moves from one register to another, first through this muscular interrogation in the form of closed doors that overflows all members of the family before tipping to the thriller. Irremediably embryonic sorority occurs between the housewives. The disappearance of the service weapon becomes an opportunity to make the revolution a game and question parental authority. A perilous game, certainly, in the image of all these gestures of the daily life where Iranians were filming themselves typing the heads of the mullahs to bring down their turbans. This outrage, which became a real buzz on networks, is a symbol of overthrow of power in the image of the missing weapon.
When fear changes camps and girls no longer fear defying the authority of the home, it is the same revolutionary logic that takes root. This is the whole symbol of the title of the film explained in the first seconds. Some species of fig trees produce young aerial roots that gradually join those implanted in soil. Metaphor of generational conflicts, it is the youth that takes with it its allies, like this female rebellion which incubates in the home of the Figuier seeds.
Poignant, Rasoulof's feature film would have earned much more than a curious special prize at the closing ceremony even if the film Anora (read our critical) has not demerited. Congratulations also to his young performers who could equally have claimed the prize of female interpretation. As the Iranian director explained, the idea of the scenario came to him when a prison guard told him how much he wanted to hang himself at the door of one of the cells. His jailer, like Iman in the film, had to live with his conscience every day, while his children asked him the unspeakable answer: « What are you doing at work? ? ». The flame of movement cannot extinguish even if the repression does not seem to blow too. In Iran, the year 2023 was the most deadly in terms of executions. 853: a sad one record and probably the price to pay for freedom. Shouldn't it have given Rasoulof the golden palm and sent a message of international hope?
He looks upsetting this movie. Thank you for this built return!
Gracias, yes, I loved it. Our family meals next door are gnognotes. ^^^
[...] this theme was omnipresent. First by denunciation of the mullah diktat with the Seeds of Mohammad Rasoulof's wild fig tree. Then through the dictatorship of images and the cult of gameism in The [...]