Rasoulof, Mohammad

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    Mohammad Rasoulof Had to Escape Iran to Finish His Most Daring Film Yet

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    In the early months of 2024, a few weeks into the shooting of his new film, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” Mohammad Rasoulof learned that his lawyers received a letter. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court had processed his case, composed of several charges against his previous movies and activism, and sentenced him to eight years in prison. Rasoulof asked his lawyers how much time he had before the authorities took him in. The process of filing an appeal, they told him, could take up to two months. He still had some time.Rasoulof and his team worked around the clock on shooting and postproduction. Another call came in. The court had rejected the appeal, and his eight-year sentence was to start immediately. To make an example of him, his lawyers warned, government agents would probably storm his house in the middle of the night, handcuff him and take him to jail.Rasoulof had to make the most difficult decision of his life. He was always determined to live and work in Iran, which had been a wellspring of inspiration throughout his filmmaking career. He had already been arrested in 2010 for shooting a movie about the Green Movement, a period of mass unrest in the wake of the 2009 presidential election, which he never finished. He was sent to jail for seven months in 2022 after signing a petition that was critical of the government. So he didn’t fear being in prison, and he felt no urge to flee from regime interrogators and torturers. If anything, those encounters had provided fodder for his work. Yet this time was different. Already confronted with the likelihood that he would have to serve at least five years of his eight-year sentence, Rasoulof expected that the court would probably open a new case once it learned about “Sacred Fig,” which he was shooting in secret, without the appropriate approvals. Serving five years, plus whatever the latest charges would yield, would surely end his career. So Rasoulof decided to leave Iran.He had learned, from another inmate during one of his prison stints, about a network of people who specialized in helping persecuted citizens escape Iran. When Rasoulof contacted them, they advised him to leave everything behind, including his electronic devices and IDs, throw some clothes in a backpack and meet them in a town near Tehran.Rasoulof was taken to a hiding place and, from there, driven on a side road to another city. After a few days of traveling along abandoned roads, he reached a small village on the border. He stayed in a small room for a few days, preparing for the final leg of his journey, which involved a hike over the mountains into a neighboring country. The villagers, who had met many people in his circumstances, suspected he was important because the network regularly checked in about his well-being. For the villagers, harboring such an escapee entailed more risk, which meant more pay. When it was time for Rasoulof to depart, they refused to release him.Astonished by this turn of events, members of the network negotiated a deal with the villagers. At midnight, he was delivered to a spot in the middle of nowhere. It was so dark he couldn’t see anything. Money changed hands, and he was returned to the people he hired to smuggle him out of the country. They then took him to another border village, from which the passage to the neighboring country was longer and more treacherous.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mohammad Rasoulof, Director Who Fled Iran, Brings a Message of Hope to Cannes

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      At a news conference for his film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” Mohammad Rasoulof reveled details of his escape from the country to avoid a prison sentence.While shooting his new film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” the director Mohammad Rasoulof learned that he was facing eight years in prison for making movies that criticize Iran’s hard-line government.So Rasoulof fled Iran, made his way to Germany, and then arrived in France this past week for the Cannes Film Festival. After “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” premiered in competition at the festival to strong reviews on Friday night, Rasoulof promised to continue making films that shine a light on the situation in his country.“The Islamic Republic has taken the Iranian people hostage,” he said at a news conference on Saturday. “It’s very important, then, to talk about this indoctrination.”Set against a backdrop of student protests in Tehran, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” follows an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran whose job approving death sentences begins to take a heavy toll on him and his family. The judge’s paranoia is stoked after his gun goes missing, and as he begins to suspect his wife and daughters of conspiring against him, he makes drastic moves to determine who the culprit is.Rasoulof said the idea for the film had come to him in 2022, when he was imprisoned alongside the director Jafar Panahi for signing a petition that called on Iran’s security forces to use restraint during public protests.After his release in February 2023, the director began formulating a plan to shoot “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” in a clandestine fashion, with a small crew, so as not to arouse suspicion. “Sometimes people said, ‘There’s someone outside lurking,’ and we would all scatter,” Mahsa Rostami, an actress in the film, said at the news conference. “We just prayed that this project would be followed through to the end.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Iranian Film Director Mohammad Rasoulof Flees Country After Jail Sentence

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      Mohammad Rasoulof, known for the award-winning “There Is No Evil,” had been barred from leaving Iran after his work criticized the country’s clerical leadership.The celebrated Iranian film director Mohammad Rasoulof said he had fled the country, after a court sentenced him to eight years in prison for his movies.Mr. Rasoulof — known for his award-winning film “There Is No Evil” — had been barred from leaving Iran after his work criticized life under authoritarian rule in the country. His lawyer, Babak Paknia, wrote last week on social media that a court had sentenced Mr. Rasoulof to imprisonment, whipping and a fine for movies that it called “examples of collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the country’s security.”On Monday, Mr. Rasoulof announced his escape from Iran in an Instagram post that featured a video of snow-capped mountains and said he had reached a “safe place” after a “difficult and long journey.”Addressing Iran’s clerical rulers, Mr. Rasoulof said he had been forced to leave “because of your oppression and barbarity,” and that he had now joined Iranians in exile who were “impatiently waiting to bury you and your machine of oppression in the depths of history.”He did not provide details on his location or respond to a message from The New York Times.“There Is No Evil” — which focused on executioners in Iran — won the top prize in the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020. Mr. Rasoulof, who had directed the film in secret, was not allowed to leave the country to attend that award ceremony.A scene from Mr. Rasoulof’s “There Is No Evil,” which won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020.Kino LorberIran’s film industry is acclaimed internationally and heavily policed at home, where the authorities can ban screening and filming.Mr. Rasoulof’s new movie, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in France this month.Some of the film’s producers were interrogated by the authorities and some of its actors were barred from leaving the country, Mr. Paknia said in social media posts last month.Mr. Rasoulof told The New York Times in 2020 that early on in his career he had used allegorical stories to avoid confronting power directly, but eventually felt that was “a form of accepting the tyrannical regime.”He went on to offer sharp critiques of Iran’s clerical rulers with his films, including “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” and “A Man of Integrity” — which won an award at Cannes in 2017.Over the years, the Iranian authorities had charged him with propaganda against the state, confiscated his passport, arrested and prosecuted him.In a statement released on Monday, Mr. Rasoulof said “the scope and intensity of repression has reached a point of brutality where people expect news of another heinous government crime every day.”Leily Nikounazar More

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      ‘A Man of Integrity’ Review: Fighting Dirty

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      Mohammad Rasoulof’s scathing drama about corruption in Iran is striking in its blunt rage, if somewhat exasperating in its monotony.The films of Mohammad Rasoulof often tell stories of ordinary Iranians cornered within a censorious government. It’s a theme with personal import for Rasoulof, who, since 2010, has faced several arrests and bans for his cinematic critiques of the Iranian state.Where the 2021 film “There Is No Evil” portrayed the moral absurdities of capital punishment, “A Man of Integrity” takes a broader view, examining how corruption has permeated everyday Iranian life. Here, Rasoulof delivers his diagnosis with a bluntness that is striking in its rage, if somewhat exasperating in its monotony.Reza (Reza Akhlaghirad), a goldfish farmer with a rebellious streak, lives in the countryside in North Iran. His isolated rural lifestyle is a deliberate choice: an attempt to evade an orthodox yet opportunistic social system, where, as one character puts it, you either become the oppressor or the oppressed.But a shady new corporation, referred to mysteriously as “The Company,” has upset the local bucolic balance. Its operators have their eyes on Reza’s land, and they resort to extortionary tricks — including poisoning his goldfish — to get him to give it up. As Reza and his wife, Hadis (a superb Soudabeh Beizaee), try various personal, legal and not-so-legal means of recourse, they encounter a Kafkaesque labyrinth of dead ends, greasy palms and sinister violence.Employing minimal background music and a bleak, blue-gray color palette, Rasoulof evokes a sense of nihilism that is as suffocating as it is affecting. Every narrative twist — including some rather contrived mafia-thriller turns — hammers home the same point: that it’s hard to be a good man in a bad system. Given the system Rasoulof works within (and against), however, it’s a message well worth repeating.A Man of IntegrityRated PG-13 for scenes of drug use, violence and general existential bleakness. In Farsi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘There Is No Evil’ Review: Condemned, One Way or Another

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      “There Is No Evil,” which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival last year, is one of the most kinetic films ever made in secret.Because “There Is No Evil” has landed in international headlines — the director, Mohammad Rasoulof, made the movie covertly and without the approval of Iranian authorities, and a ban on his leaving the country prevented him from accepting the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in person last year — revealing what it’s about seems fair. But the film is constructed to surprise you.The first of four episodes follows a father (Ehsan Mirhosseini) going about daily tasks. He picks up his wife and daughter. They run errands and go out for pizza. He checks his mother’s blood pressure. Then he awakes at 3 a.m. and heads to work. For some reason, he hesitates when a traffic light turns green. He is an executioner, and at his job, a green light tells him to release the gallows floor.All four episodes involve people pressed into carrying out official executions in Iran. While the stories do not carry over, the themes do. In the third segment, Javad (Mohammad Valizadegan), a soldier, has committed a killing to secure a three-day leave, making a decision that Pouya (Kaveh Ahangar), also a soldier, faces in the second episode. The fourth chapter examines how the choice to act or not reverberates for years.If some twists initially seem facile, the stories deepen with reflection on the characters’ motivations at each moment. This is one of the most kinetic films ever made surreptitiously; the long takes, particularly one in which Pouya retrieves a condemned man, then crumples, are breathtaking. And to make a movie that ponders the moral rot of an unjust system while under the gun of that unjust system is courageous and artistically potent.There Is No EvilNot rated. In Persian and German, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 31 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More