When fiction tells the truth better than non-fiction ever could[1]

Each fall, I teach a freshman seminar at Brown University on the history of protest movements in Iran. You can imagine how this course has changed since Mahsa Amini’s death in September 2022 . In well-practiced tones, I recite the catechism of statistics from the explosive Woman Life Freedom movement and the ensuing government crackdown: 2 million participants in 160 cities, at least 543 deaths (71 of them minors),^[2] 30,000+ arrests, 10 summary executions for protestors, about a dozen more waiting on death row^[3], untold numbers of injuries, blacklistings and travel restrictions for celebrities who dare to speak up. 

Yet despite the urgency for a thorough exploration of these events in the visual form, we are still waiting for a definitive documentary of Woman Life Freedom. With his feature film The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024), I argue, Rasoulof beat them all to the punch. In the absence of a strong on-the-ground documentary filmed inside Iran, Rasoulof looks to make up the shortfall by employing documentary-style techniques and leveraging raw footage of the events. Though his film is fictional, what he produced remains the most complete, compelling, and accurate visual account of the movement thus far. 

Rasoulof’s gripping thriller is a portrait of a family divided. The father, Iman, is a judge who has just attained a long-awaited promotion, only to find his new position draws him deeper into the regime’s web of secrecy and authoritarianism. He is bullied into signing off on death sentences for protestors’ whose cases he hasn’t even read, and is issued a handgun for self-protection. Meanwhile, Iman’s two daughters, Rezvan and Sana, sympathize with the protestors after they witness first hand how their friends are beaten, arrested, or shot. Najmeh, the mother, tries to maintain a delicate balancing act: encouraging Iman to empathize with their daughters’ legitimate grievances, while pleading with the girls to take it easy on their father, who is under immense strain at work. The tension reaches a fever pitch when Iman’s gun goes missing, his paranoia mounts and the family turns their suspicions on each other. 

In addition to the tense thriller elements, the brilliance of Rasoulof’s film lies in his ability to conjure the overwhelming atmosphere of a society convulsing with protests of righteous indignation. By incorporating raw social media footage from the events, Rasoulof conveys the intense urgency of the uprising through a series of real and disturbing images: women being attacked, shoved into Morality Police vehicles, or dragged along the floor of a busy metro station; protestors being beaten; protestors being shot at; protestors bleeding out; gunshots in the distance; cars aflame; tear gas streaming. 

Incorporating these raw videos alongside clips from state TV, the film constructs a kind of dramatic irony. While state TV anchor Maryam Ja’fari (sporting a conservative black chador) drones on about families buying back-to-school supplies in an inane news report, the girls, Rezvan and Sana, furtively text each other Instagram videos of the drama unfolding in the streets. The next TV news segment provides the government’s side of the story: the protests are cast as riots (eghteshāsh) that disturb citizens’ peace and destroy public property. We follow Rezvan and Sana’s text conversation, until the camera abandons it for full immersion in the video and sound of the authentic clips. 

The surprise comes when the film snaps out of social media mode, and back into a character’s POV, but this time, it’s the mother’s. A few quiet beats contemplative face implies that Najmeh too has seen and heard things other than what is on state TV. As she hears the chants of “Death to the dictator!” emanating from the street, the seeds of doubt are being planted in her mind. Her slow realization over the course of the film – that it is impossible to maintain neutrality in such a situation – becomes the centerpiece of the narrative. She represents a class of Iranians who have tried to get along with the Islamic Republic by respecting its authority. Traditionally, a privileged subset of families have played by the rules in order to maintain a certain lifestyle. But the brutal reality of the state’s unjust violence against protestors – mirrored by the increasingly tyrannical behavior of a paranoid Iman towards his wife and children – forces Najmeh out of her position of supposed neutrality. 

Part of Rasoulof’s success stems from his characters, whose development mirrors large-scale transformations in society. Najmeh’s journey in particular reflects a broader trend of collapsing support for the Iranian government in the wake of the WLF crackdown. According to a leaked government report from November 2022, 84 percent of Iranians expressed a positive view of the protest movement.^[4] In an interview on the one-year anniversary of Amini’s death, a protestor and female software engineer from Tehran echoed this sentiment: “I’ve noticed that many children of people who work in the government’s lower ranks have turned against the state, and they tell me their parents have also changed their minds. There’s been a collapse in support for the government in the poorer sections of society.”^[5] Though opposition to the Islamic Republic has been ongoing since its inception in 1979, WLF engendered a tectonic shift in some Iranians’ attitude towards the state. It radicalized some people who previously turned a blind eye to the regime’s abuses. Rasoulof’s film humanizes and personalizes this development through his portrait of this family pitted against each other. 

Rasoulof surrounds his characters in diegetic sounds and images that contribute to the engrossing feel of the film. Just after the scene in this clip, several real clips from BBC Persian news reports of September 2022 play on the family’s TV. These clips, which feature famous anchors such as Jamaluddin Mousavi and Najieh Gholami, are instantly recognizable to any Iranian viewer and heighten the sense that we are watching events unfold in real time. In another scene, as Najmeh drives her car around Tehran, we hear pro-regime commentators disparaging the protesters on public radio. Yet when she turns the corner into the middle of a street protest, the audience is again dropped directly into raw video ripped from social media, particularly those of the well-known activist account, 1500 Tasvir. The effect is immersive, disorienting, and affective. The contrast between pro-regime narrative and the reality on the ground is amplified. In this way, the film incorporates all the important sources of discourse as they compete against each other: state TV, diaspora news media, social media, radio personalities, and of course, the voices of state insiders and protesters themselves, in the form of the main characters. 

Existing documentary materials on the Woman Life Freedom movement have attempted to reach this level of absorbing, informative realism, but each has its own shortcomings. Released in the heady weeks just after Mahsa Amini’s death, BBC Persian’s 25-minute news report, “Why is Iran’s TikTok Generation Demanding ‘Woman, Life, Freedom?’” (November 2022), produced by Kurdish-Iranian journalist Jiyar Gol, remains one of the best, if not the best, factual video sources to approach the topic. But its very timeliness means it only covers the first few weeks of protests. It’s strange that after two and a half years and significant international media coverage, this effort has yet to be materially surpassed. 

Perhaps one of Jiyar Gol’s own statements in the documentary holds the answer: “The BBC can’t operate freely in Iran,” he notes, “so we rely on people sending us videos from inside the country.” In an international media vacuum, sufficient raw footage to generate a full-length documentary is hard to come by. Still, BBC Persian has an advantage over other media outlets due to its connections, linguistic expertise, and sources inside Iran. BBC’s follow up to this report, “Nika’s Last Breath” (April 2024), is a well-sourced deep dive into the murky circumstances of 16-year-old protester Nika Shakarami’s sexual assault and murder at the hands of the Morality Police. However it is far too limited in scope to serve as an introduction to the broader protest movement. 

Though not strictly speaking a documentary, Al Jazeera’s longest video report on the subject, entitled “What’s Changed in Iran?” (November 2023), comes in at just over 12 minutes and illustrates the difficulties involved in producing informed and factual video content about Iran. The report seems short on raw footage compared to the BBC piece, and its reliance on talking heads is uninspiring. While the informed analysis from commentators Nahid Siamdoust, Sara Bazoobandi, and Tara Sepehri Far is very valuable and illuminating, the unchallenged inclusion of questionable pro-regime voices such as Hasan Ahmadian reveals either Al Jazeera’s lack of expertise in the area, or a misguided ‘fair and balanced’ approach that doesn’t work when covering authoritarian governments. 

In other cases, the focus of the documentaries unwittingly shifts from the events of WLF to the difficulties faced by activists trying to document the Islamic Republic’s human rights abuses. They become, in essence, records of undocumentability. This includes recent attempts such as PBS Frontline’s Inside the Iranian Uprising (June 2023) and VICE’s “Inside Iran: What Happened to Iran’s Woman-Led Uprising?” (December 2023)^[6]. PBS’s 53-minute effort is to be commended for its rigor, and its main contribution is the new interview footage it offers with key witnesses, like Nika Shakarami’s mother, or political prisoners who detail their harrowing experiences of sexual assault. However, it doesn’t have a strong sense of narrative and somehow manages to confuse the story with outside voices that don’t really matter. While thorough and well-sourced, the documentary is not for beginners. It’s more like a deep cut for those who are already well-acquainted with the ongoing struggle to hold the Islamic Republic accountable. 

VICE’s report, meanwhile, features American journalists who bravely – or perhaps naively – travel to Iran to try to film some interviews and get an idea of the mood on the street post-Woman Life Freedom in late 2023. Courageous as their efforts are, the resulting documentary is mostly in exercise in watching the journalists get rebuffed at every turn: they are approached by police within minutes of turning on their cameras in public, or blatantly cut-off mid-interview by their government minders. What little access they can get typically presents government narratives, though to their credit, not without challenge or criticism. Before leaving the country, they say, they are held at gunpoint and asked to forfeit all their footage. 

Watching and re-watching each of these documentaries, I realized two things: first, that there are only so many brutal videos of protesters being beaten, shot, killed, hit by cars, or run over by motorcycles that a person can watch before the brain shuts down. Second, that the lack of international media access in Iran means that most of the documentaries can only document their lack of access. It means that almost all new interviews and B-roll in these documentaries must be shot abroad. As a result, the sense of realism and urgency is often lost, as we are reduced to watching, for example, activists abroad sifting through files on their computer or, as in the PBS documentary, an exiled Iranian-Kurdish human rights advocate gazing wistfully at the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. 

Rasoulof implicitly understood each of these limitations well. He knew that to make a credible document of political history, he had to film inside Iran.^[7] So he took his last shot to produce his magnum opus before fleeing the country in the face of an eight-year prison sentence. He also knew that overwhelming the viewer with too much raw footage could only serve to make them numb, to desensitize. So he used his key formalistic device sparingly – four times in the course of 165 minutes, he provides viewers with 30 seconds to two minutes of raw clips. By not overplaying his hand, Rasoulof succeeded in producing what the documentaries couldn’t: the most accurate and engrossing visual account of the Woman Life Freedom movement thus far.