The film “The Seeds of the Wild Fig Tree” takes place during the Iranian repression and shows amateur footage to “pay tribute to them and broadcast them in my own way”, the director explained on France Inter on Wednesday.
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“Today’s phones and the digital world have become a real counter-power in Iran,” explains Wednesday September 11 on France Inter Mohammad Rasoulof, whose film “The Seeds of the Wild Fig Tree”, Special Prize at Cannes, is released on Wednesday September 18.
The exiled filmmaker, who has been deprived of his freedom several times by the regime, explains that “When there are raids on my office at home, the guards [de la révolution] always have a camera in their hand.” “It is no longer an instrument for making films, it has become something much more important,” he insists.
His film, which takes place during the repression of the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement against the regime from 2022, also shows real amateur footage. It is for him a “a way of paying homage to these images and of spreading them in my own way.”
“The authorities did everything to prevent the images of this repression from leaking, journalists were prevented from working. And yet, it was the people themselves who were able to capture the images of this repression and they can be found everywhere on the internet.”he says happily.
The 51-year-old filmmaker was “stunned” by these amateur videos, which he discovered after leaving prison. He went “meeting these young girls to understand what was in their heads”And “My reaction was to make this film”continues Mohammad Rasoulof.
Shot in secret, his film is a paranoid thriller about an Iranian investigator and his family, in the midst of the repression of protests against the regime.