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The Roots of Power in Mohammad Rasoulof’s ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ (2024)
Why do human beings crave power?
Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024) raises some important questions: Why do human beings crave power? Why do some of us feel the urge to exercise control over others’ lives and choices? How does authority operate in society by hypnotizing almost entire populations into believing that a particular value system is the only truth? And what good is faith if all it does is coerce and condition people into accepting a narrow conservative worldview as the only way of life, and empower and embolden them to unleash violence on sceptics and non-conformers?
Like the seeds of the sacred fig, political power deriving from religious fundamentalism often spreads its roots so deep and wide that it eventually emerges as the only social and cultural force. It subsumes all other realities within its darkness and suspends rationality with such aggression that even our most innocent dreams, desires, and pleasures assume shapes of guilt and bury themselves in the debris of our crumbling selves.
Rasoulof’s film interrogates the religious and political power structures in Iranian society, and explores the struggles of an existence poised precariously between ambition, power, and fear on the one…
