On May 8, hours after an Iranian court sentenced the award-winning Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof to eight years in prison, he announced he had fled to Europe. According to his lawyer, the court found him guilty of “collusion against national security.” In addition to the lengthy detention, he was facing a flogging, a fine, and the confiscation of his property. Rasoulof’s latest work, The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024), debuted at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on May 25 and won the Fipresci special jury prize for “drawing attention to unsustainable injustice.” 

Rasoulof’s previous films, A Man of Integrity (2017) and There Is No Evil (2020), both explore social issues in Iran, and throughout his career he has been subjected to numerous arrests. In 2022 he was jailed for one year and banned from filmmaking for two years on the charge of “propaganda against the system.”