Foreign Lessons
Brazil 1971, Iran 2022, Cannes 2024 and 2025
Two contenders for the 2025 Oscar for Best International Feature were about repressive regimes and the strength of women: the Brazilian I’m Still Here and the Iranian The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which the year before won the special Jury prize at Cannes.
The International Oscar went to Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, the true story of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens, an engineer and former congressman, was, as they say, ‘disappeared’ by Brazil’s military regime in January of 1971 .
Walter Salles, who made the wonderful Motorcycle Diaries in 2004 about the young Che Guevara going through the Andes in 1952 , years before he became a revolutionary, excels at sharing the happiness of his protagonists. Two-thirds of I’m Still Here communicates the happy home life of Eunice , Rubens, and their bright children —four girls and the one son—in a large, comfortable house next to Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro. It’s all, ease and joy inside the Paiva family. When the men knock on the door to take Rubens away, the ease is halted by shock, followed by days, weeks, years of unknowing. When Eunice too is taken away with one of the daughters, her glimpses of the prison are fragmented and inconclusive. Unable to access her husband’s bank account, she has to move with the children to Sao Paulo, where, at the age of 47 she enrolls in law school and becomes an effective and respected activist. It takes the rest of the film—decades of her real life— to find out what really happened to her husband.
The title I’m Still Here expresses Eunice’s defiance, but she’s still a woman of privilege. The Seed Of The Sacred Fig is about the other side of the power dynamic, and centers on a modest enforcer who serves the whims of a totalitarian state, what that job does to him and to his family. Its director,Mohammad Rasoulof, has been repeatedly imprisoned by the Islamic Revolutionary Court , and his film is all the more remarkable in that it looks at the life and soul of the sort of man who repeatedly sentenced him. Last year, when it was announced that the The Seed of the Sacred Fig was in competition at Cannes , Rasoulof was sentenced once again, this time to eight years in prison, flogging, and confiscation of everything he owned. He fled Iran on foot, and has remained in exile in Germany ever since.
His lush and fruity title, The Seed of the Sacred Fig , evokes Tran Anh Hung’s 1993 The Scent of Green Papaya , Ingmar Bergman’s 1959 Wild Strawberries. But a prologue explains that the seed of the sacred fig is transported in bird shit before it drops into trees that it then strangles as it grows. The sacred fig is also the Bodhi tree, the one that the Buddha sat under when he received enlightenment. You can interpret this prologue to mean that faith crushes what it lands on.
Mohammad Rasoulof tells the story of Iman, a meekly ambitious family man with a bit of power in a cruel regime. We’re in Tehran in 2022. Iman believes, as does his wife Najmeh, that God’s law cannot be wrong.
It’s a film about ambition and resistance. Movie notions of ambition come from the brash American careerists of What Makes Sammy Run, The Godfather, Wall Street; movie notions about resistance come from World War II movies about hiding Jews in attics and parachutists in isolated barns, showing false papers to the Nazis and blowing up their trains.
But we’re in a new world, where the enemy can be your own country. Iran has had only two leaders since 1979, when the secular Shah was deposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who ruled for ten years. After his death in 1989, another Ayatollah took over, Ayatollah Khameini, who has been in power for 36 years. The Iranian theocracy demands loyalty, faith, and strict adherence to its religious principles . Its Islamic Revolutionary Court determines the punishments for any word or deed against the state—prison, beatings and death.
Our hero Iman has just been promoted to the government job he always wanted: as an investigating judge in the Islamic Revolutionary Court, he will have prestige, responsibility, and possibly a three-bedroom apartment so his two daughters won’t have to be on top of each other in bunk beds anymore. He just wants to follow the rules, to do well within the system. His wife Najmeh says his prayers have been answered.
He’s a man of faith, a trusting husband, a big man with a belly, a beard, and beseeching eyes. Najmeh is slim, with a sharp haircut , and she lives in a state of permanent vigilance: the teenager Sana is a potential handful, and the college student Rezvan has a mind of her own. Not good female attributes in a country where women barely have any more rights , and where leaving the house without a hijab can mean arrest beatings, even death.
Iman wants to do his best, but when, as he begins the job, he asks a colleague how he can possibly evaluate the five volumes of a case file in the time he’s been given, his colleague tells him “Just sign off on it,” and then writes a single word on the desk calendar between them: “Wiretapped.”
Looking for the truth isn’t the point. Right and wrong no longer matter. Implementing the will of the leader is the only thing that counts.
The same colleague adds “The boss doesn’t like you,” and explains that Iman’s predecessor was fired for refusing to sign a death indictment.
Chekhov alert. Iman is given a gun to protect himself, and brings it home.
He and Najmeh take their girls out to dinner — in a late covid-era sidewalk shed— to explain that they have to behave with decorum and caution. Iman will be under scrutiny, he could be a target, they could all be in danger. The film is set in September of 2022, after a young woman named Mahsa Amini died in custody after being arrested by the Morality Police for wearing her hijab incorrectly. Rezvan is a university student, and the protests are beginning as women and girls take to the streets of Tehran, chanting “Woman! Life! Freedom!”.
The hallways of the Revolutionary Court building are lined with identical neat bearded men in suits, each holding fist to chest in a pledge of loyalty and obedience. It takes a while to register that these men are life-sized cut-out photographs. I don’t know the meaning of these men. The film was shot in deep secrecy, so that these cut-outs could be stand-ins for actors . Rasoulof was so protective of his cast that the two young daughters are played by fully adult actresses, Setareh Maleki, Mahsa Rostami who are also now in exile, as are some of the crew. The actor who stars as Iman , Missagh Zareh, remains in Irans, as does the actress who plays his wife , Soheila Golestani.
The Cannes Film Festival today awarded its Palme d’Or to It Was Just An Accident by Jafar Panahi, who was baned from making films for 15 years.