Deadline’s Learn the Screenplay collection spotlighting the scripts behind the awards season’s most talked-about movies continues with the Cannes Movie Pageant Particular Jury Prize winner The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Neon‘s dramatic thriller, written and directed by Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof, which simply made the Oscar shortlist as Germany’s entry into the Greatest Worldwide Function race.
Under, learn the screenplays for each the English- and Farsi-language variations of the movie, which Neon opened in choose U.S. theaters on the finish of November. It has since scored Golden Globe and Critics Selection nominations for prime foreign-language movie, and was the Nationwide Board of Evaluation‘s Greatest Worldwide Movie winner.
The movie follows a household thrust into the highlight when Iman (Misagh Zareh), a newly appointed investigating decide in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court docket, turns into a goal. As political unrest erupts with the “Girl, Life, Freedom” motion, Iman realizes his job is much more harmful than anticipated. The disappearance of his gun from his own residence fuels his paranoia and doubt inside his household.
Iman’s spouse Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) struggles to take care of stability as their teenage daughters, Sana (Setareh Maleki) and Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), develop into more and more concerned within the burgeoning motion. Their rising defiance and questioning of their dad and mom’ values additional pressure the household unit. Najmeh, in the meantime, is torn between her religion, household, and her personal conscience as seismic shift is rippling via Iranian society, ignited by the tragic loss of life of Mahsa Amini, a younger Iranian girl who was arrested by the morality police for not carrying a hijab correctly in 2022.
Iman’s place as a decide is a intently guarded secret. However when his cowl is blown, he retreats along with his household to the ruins of his childhood residence. Remoted and powerless, he witnesses the erosion of authority, mirroring the broader societal upheaval. Because the motion positive aspects momentum, Iman finds himself a captive in his circle of relatives, unable to take care of management.
The movie’s palpable sense of hazard is heightened by the inclusion of actual footage depicting protesters dealing with violence. Furthermore, the real-life actors and Rasoulof risked their lives to secretly movie this highly effective movie.
Rasoulof came upon he was to be imprisoned whereas filming and fled his residence nation via what he described to Deadline as a “sophisticated” and “anguishing” journey throughout Europe to a secure home in Germany, the place he was granted asylum. Again in Iran, Rasoulof is needed by authorities who’ve sentenced him to eight years in jail alongside a collection of bodily punishments together with flogging for “signing statements and making movies and documentaries.”
He informed Deadline how the concept for the movie had come to him with serving a yr in jail for taking pictures with no allow.
“There was a mixture of prisoners of conscience and criminals after I was there,” he recollects. “However for me, it was considerably of a discovery, as a result of I used to be attempting to focus extra on the jail officers and attempting to grasp their perspective versus having a confrontational relationship with them. The opposite attention-grabbing half for me was that I used to be watching the political occasions that have been unfolding exterior — the ‘Girl, Life, Freedom’ motion — from behind bars. And that in itself, watching it with different prisoners from contained in the jail, was a really distinctive expertise.”
Listed below are the scripts:
Extra from this Story Arc
Learn The Screenplay Collection