Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof is already at the Cannes festival after fleeing his country, where he faced an eight-year prison sentence, in addition to the confiscation of all his property and a punishment by lashing. Rasoulof has participated in the final day of the official competition section with his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a resounding family drama of almost three hours about the awareness of three women, a mother and her two daughters, in the face of the wave of protests that began in 2022 due to the death of the young Masha Amini, beaten and arrested for wearing the wrong veil. The head of the family in Rasoulof’s film is a regime official, an investigator who works in the revolutionary courts signing death sentences.
Faced with the all-powerful and paranoid attitude of the father, a man conscious but passive in the face of the lies of the regime, the three women in his house, each with a different view of the reality that surrounds them, begin to question what is happening when they find themselves immersed. in the violent wave of repression through the friend of one of the daughters. Almost the entire film takes place inside the family home in Tehran and in their cell phones. This resource serves Rasoulof to contrast all types of documentary archives of the protests with other materials broadcast by official television, the channel through which the mother receives information.
Rasoulof, who in the final stretch of his film takes a powerful turn towards a kind of arid rural neo-Western, crossed the border of his country on foot at the beginning of May without a passport (he has had it confiscated since 2017) and requested political asylum in Germany. According to him he has declared to Le Monde, He has chosen exile to avoid returning to prison. “I was in solitary confinement for forty days in a room the size of a sofa. There was no physical torture, they avoid it with people who have access to the media, but there were other types of humiliation, like not letting you go to the bathroom so that you would be afraid to drink.” Rasoulof, who in 2020 won the Berlinale Golden Bear for The devil does not exist, He had not returned to Cannes since 2017, when he was also awarded in the section a certain look by A man of integrity. The political plea of The Seed of the Sacred Fig It is an exciting response to the brutal cruelty against women of the Iranian regime and places Rasoulof’s film among the candidates to be part of this Saturday’s list of winners.
This Friday the French animated film also competed The most precious of the marchandises, by Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), a story about a Jewish baby thrown into the snow from a deportee train to Auschwitz that was Jean-Louis Trintignant’s last work as a narrator. It was not the only French film of recent days: the serial of teenage love L’amour Ouf, directed by actor Gilles Lellouche, has every chance of sweeping the national box office but has contributed very little, to say nothing, to the competition.
Quite the opposite can be said of the beautiful Indian film All We Imagine As Light, from director Payal Kapadia; next to Anora, by Sean Baker, Grand Tour, by Miguel Gomes and Caught by the Tides, by Jia Zhang-ke, is among the best of this year in Cannes.
Kapadia is a 38-year-old filmmaker who already captivated the festival three years ago when she debuted, within the Filmmakers’ Fortnight, with her film A Night of Knowing Nothing, then awarded as the best documentary. If in that work Kapadia configured with an epistolary narrative of an intimate tone a kaleidoscope of archives around resistance, also that of cinema itself, in All We Imagine As Light focuses on the friendship between two nurses living in Mumbai. With a delicacy that is overwhelming, despite being at times as elusive as her characters, Kapadia explores the relationships and emotions of these women with a very particular beauty and sensuality. The final stretch, far from Mumbai, in a coastal town, justifies all the enthusiasm that the film has aroused.
The jury chaired by the American actress and director Greta Gerwig has two unquestionable Palme d’Ors on the table, Anora and Grand Tour, but Kapadia’s film also has serious options. Without a doubt, Rasoulof could win a well-deserved political reading recognition for the terrible circumstances surrounding his brave film, and Coppola may win a special award for his entire career, as happened two years ago with the Dardenne brothers . It would not be strange either that the phenomenon of Emilia Perez, the musical narco queer by Jacques Audiard, to scratch the point, is in all the Palme d’Or pools, although it pales in comparison to the other major works.
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