»Iranian director Mohammad Rassoulof is a filmmaker who has devoted his art and risked his freedom and his to condemn, without equivocation, the violence and oppression of the Iranian regime. He does so not with oblique metaphors and vague symbolism, of the kind that would get his films past the censors, but by showing directly what is happening in Iran: How police and corrupt officials take bribes, how men are imprisoned and executed without a fair trail. How police beat girls on the street for not wearing the hijab.
His new film, THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG ", looks at a family of judge who signs death warrants for the regime. He tries to keep his work separate from his family life. But when his two children join the anti-government Women Life Freedom protests, the violence of the outside world comes crashing in. What first looks like an intimate family drama reveals itself to be a horror film. But the monster is the ideology of the Islamic regime. And that monster is already inside the house.
Rassoulof knows that horror first hand. He's been arrested and imprisoned many times, questioned and beaten. The government banned his films, made it illegal for him to work. They took his passport. He finally fled Iran this year, coming here to Germany, where he's applying for asylum.
But Rassoulof also sees the absurdity at the core of an authoritarian society.
He told me about being arrested, and finding the cops were all fans of his movies, and were less interested in interrogating him, than gossiping about his actresses. He joked he should thank the government from throwing him in prison, because that's where he met the criminals who would eventually help him escape across the border.
Rassoulof, with his appreciation of the absurd, would see the irony in his movie being named Germany's candidate for next year's Oscars at a time when this country, a country I'm currently applying to become a citizen of, is closing its borders to people because they look like Mohammed Rassoulof. Or share his religion. Where the heads of parties that profess to be social, progressive or christian, claim people fleeing violence and war are a greater threat to democracy than the home-grown poison of fascist ideology that is spreading unchecked inside our house.
The lesson I take from Mohammad Rassoulof's films is to look directly go ahead: scream at the horror, laugh at the absurdity, fight the injustice. But whatever you do, do not look away. And do not be silent.
Mohammad Rassoulof can't be with us today because of security concerns – reach of the Tehran regime is wide. But it is my great pleasure, and honor, to present the 2024 Hollywood Reporter Award to Amin Sadraei, the producer of THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG and to the film's two young stars, Setareh Malek, and Mahsa Rostami.«
