It’s a dialectic, pressure in, pressure out: Autocratic societies will almost by definition spawn rebellious responses, and so in a sense you could say that the filmmaking paradigm exemplified by Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof is something the Iranian theocracy has willed into existence for itself, despite explicitly demanding the opposite. Panahi, making lovable and rough-hewn meta-movies while being officially forbidden to do so, has gotten most of the press. But Rasoulof, whose new film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, opens here this week, has had his fair share of heroic skirmishes — arrested and sentenced and imprisoned multiple times over the past 14 years — yet continues to make his system-critiquing, imam-infuriating films nonetheless. The new film was reportedly shot entirely in secret; after its acceptance at the Cannes Film Festival, Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison, plus a whipping. He walked across the border instead, without his passport, and now lives in exile in Europe.

Naturally, this stirring backstory of defiance and triumph gives the movie an extra electrical charge, a Purple Heart in the annals of extra-cinematic tribulation — if only more movies came imbued with righteous force and courage instead of vanity, greed, and cowardice. Unlike many Iranian films, Sacred Fig does not flinch from aiming squarely at the theocracy. Having faced relentless persecution and censorship, Rasoulof decided to make a film about a man, a lawyer, who must compromise himself within the system” (as the Iranian rulers themselves call it in every one of Rasoulof’s indictments). 

At least, that’s how it begins: Iman (Missagh Zareh) gets a promotion as an investigator” during the protest-crazed time following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody, after her arrest in 2022 for not wearing a hijab. But Iman quickly discovers he’s not meant to actually investigate or even read the case files for the hundreds of arrested protesters flowing across his desk, just to merely rubber-stamp the prosecutor’s charges. Often, they’re death sentences. Rasoulof’s master stroke here, and maybe the part of his film that added the flogging to his prison sentence, is the frequent inclusion of actual iPhone footage taken by protesters in the streets — images of bloodied bodies on the pavement, of helmeted police beating, terrorizing, and kidnapping civilians, of young Iranian women running free without hijabs, all of it 100% authentic and much of it new to the world’s eyes.

But then Iman sort of vanishes from the film, busy at work, and we watch his small family start to fray under the tension of representing the establishment: His social-climber wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), begins to coil tightly around the family’s reputation, which, if sullied, could put Iman in professional jeopardy, while their two college-age daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), begin to bristle at this control, especially after a schoolmate gets a face full of buckshot during a confrontation with police. (Disapproving of the freethinking friend, Sadaf steps up anyway and tweezes the buckshot out in close-up, echoing an earlier scene where she merely tweezed eyebrow hairs.) The stress fractures widen steadily until a crisis manifests: Iman’s pistol, given to him as protection — this is a country where the state’s lawyers and judges have to carry guns, and sometimes hide in safe houses — goes missing. (The damned thing was everywhere, and we try to remember where we saw it last.) Americans wouldn’t bat an eyelash over a single lost gun, but in Iran guns are illegal, and Iman’s career is suddenly in the bull’s-eye.

The daughters become the most likely suspects, and the shape of Rasoulof’s long screenplay slowly morphs this fraught family unit into a microcosm of the totalitarian state, complete with oblique threats, blindfolded interrogations, videotaped interviews, and, in the last act, DIY imprisonment. There’s even an impromptu escape and chase. Sacred Fig — the title refers to the ficus and its epiphytic way of suffocating its host trees — makes its sharp point early on and then, repetitively, at two and three-quarter hours. Rasoulof’s films have never had quite the mysterious shading and depth of feeling of the best Iranian filmmakers, maybe because of his dogged political determination. (Panahi aimed one rocket at his government, 2000’s The Circle, got arrested afterward, and then never made such a politically on-the-nose movie again.) Sacred Fig never quite catches fire: Its imagery (not counting the IRL iPhone footage) is TV-dull, and its characters are stereotypes. You can smell the constrained circumstances of the production: the thinness of the HD cinematography, the small number of interior locations, the simplicity of the performances.

Still, might we take the film’s textural shortcomings as evidence of its significance and weight, as the scars incurred in a living act of resistance? Would we have wanted a deeper, more complex film, if it meant bending to the theocracy’s will? There are more important things than movies, after all, which include the potential fates of the film’s cast, who have also not been allowed to leave the country. We worry about the actresses the most, because, in an additional layer of noncompliance, Rasoulof shot them all without hijabs while the characters were at home, as they would be in reality. (In Iranian films going back to 1980, female characters at home covered their hair, because they were in fact actresses, in full view of the audience.) Have the rules loosened by now, in the wake of the Mahsa Amini protests? Are the women safe? The world of concern outside Rasoulof’s film is large, and it makes you remember the end credits of Panahi’s first under-arrest film, This Is Not a Film (2011), which replaced the names of collaborators and colleagues with simple ellipses. That was then — Panahi’s subsequent films, politically subtle but obstinately made during a 20-year ban, have not been afraid to name names, and neither have Rasoulof’s. The fight goes on.