Iman, an honest Iranian lawyer, is promoted to the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, where he must pass summary judgement on, and potentially sentence to death, any opponent of the regime. Married and the father of two young daughters, he is ordered to hide information from his friends and family, who could be targeted to put pressure on him. On 13 September 2022, the death of Mahsa Amini marks the start of demonstrations across the country in which women film themselves burning their veils or cutting their hair; this is the beginning of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. Rezvan and Sana, the lawyer’s two well-brought-up daughters, understand through their mobile phones that what is happening in the street, in their schools, to their friends, is not what is relayed by the regime’s propaganda through the media and embodied by their father. Secretly, like many teenage girls, they look at images on social media under the duvet, huddled close together, and discover the brutality of the world around them.
Beyond the very political dimension of this film, which is also striking in its intensity, rhythm and rightness of tone, this family chamber piece speaks to us of family life with two young daughters, of parents concerned for their daughters’ well-being, or so we think, and of the link the girls maintain between inside and outside. The strength of this fiction lies in the permanent and unstable balance of what happens between the inside and the outside. What can be hidden at home and kept quiet outside? What must stay outside and above all not come in? How do you connect the two, and whom do you believe when secrecy is the law everywhere?
Questions that are all the more present in the viewer’s mind when one knows the conditions in which the film was shot and the 8-year prison sentence handed to its director Mohammad Rasoulof.
Between inside and outside, at the heart of a young girl’s transformation, the phone is a political tool.
Rezvan is at the age when teenage girls free themselves from their families and build an identity of their own, often in opposition to their family background. Thanks to social media she and her sister Sana will have proof in images that what is said at home and embodied by her father is a lie and an alienation for women. The real images of this revolution broadcast on the girl’s phone have the effect of a break-in on the viewer, who is suddenly plunged into the reality of the event. The fiction on screen is not really fiction, one thinks. And one imagines being in the place of this girl who sees the horror of the outside burst into her pink bedroom with the cuddly toys of her childhood on her bed. No choice but to be gripped by these images that impose a truth in an atmosphere where, moreover, nothing is certain any more. Najmeh, the mother of the family, tries to reconcile the beliefs around her daughters and her husband in order to return to how things were, in a world where things were clearly separate and where knowledge came only from the mouths of parents, but it is impossible. Nothing stops the will and desire of these girls to dive outside themselves and their families, into this new society where women might have a voice and perhaps one day a place.
A tool of liberation, information and/or manipulation, the phone is decidedly at the heart of transformations both intimate and political. We know that, you will tell me. But one lives it intensely when going to see “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”.
