Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof will attend Cannes premiere after fleeing home country

Jordan Hoffman
·2 min read
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In a surprising announcement, 51-year-old Iranian film director Mohammad Rasoulof will attend the premiere of “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” on Friday. The movie has one of the final competition slots and, unless it is an absolute dud, is a guarantee for one of the top awards considering the political statement it makes. As a direct result of making the movie, Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison, had his property removed, and was due to receive a flogging. He fled the country on foot and is now somewhere in Europe. 

Rasoulof, whose previous work includes “Manuscripts Don’t Burn,” “A Man of Integrity,” which won the top prize at Cannes’s Un Certain Regard sidebar, and “There Is No Evil,” which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. All of his films are critical of contemporary Iranian society, with “There Is No Evil,” about capital punishment, banned in his native country. 

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Before his current sentence, Rasoulof received a one-year prison sentence from the Islamic Revolutionary Court, and has had his travel severely restricted. 

“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is about an Iranian judge grappling with paranoia after his gun goes missing. Members of its cast, which includes the dissident Soheila Golestani, were urged by the courts to convince Rasoulof to withdraw the film.

While Iran’s relatively robust film industry has maintained an international presence even after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, including two Best International Oscars (both for director Asghar Farhadi), Rasoulof is not the only director who has faced censorship. Jafar Panahi managed to make a movie (“This Is Not A Film”) under house arrest, which was then smuggled out of the country on a flash drive. He was later sent to prison following the making of his movie “No Bears.”

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