Iranian authorities have prohibited actors and crew from Mohammed Rasoulof’s The Seed Of The Sacred Fig from leaving the country to attend the Cannes Film Festival, where the feature is set to play in Competition.
The unnamed actors and producers were summoned and questioned by authorities over the past week, according to lawyer Babak Paknia, who posted details on social media platform X. He said they were also pressured to convince Rasoulof to withdraw the film from the festival.
“Some of the film’s actors have been banned from leaving, and according to their statements, after several hours of interrogation, they were asked to ask the director to remove the film from the Cannes festival,” said Paknia.
He added that it was unclear whether the filmmaker could travel to Cannes to attend the screening of his feature.
Both the cast and plot of the film have yet to be revealed.
The Iranian auteur has a history with Cannes, winning prizes in Un Certain Regard for Goodbye (2011), Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013) and A Man Of Integrity (2017). However, his passport was confiscated after A Man Of Integrity won the top prize in the parallel section.
In 2020, Rasoulof scooped the Golden Bear at the Berlinale for There Is No Evil which advocates an anti-capital punishment message and, like his previous films, casts a critical eye on the consequences of life under authoritarian rule.
Shortly after receiving the award he was sentenced to a year in prison for “propaganda against the system” and was banned from making films and travelling abroad.
He also served jail time in Tehran from July 2022 to February 2023 for speaking out on social media against the repression of civil protestors in Iran. On release, a ban on leaving the country remained in place and Rasoulof was prevented from attending Cannes last year, where he had been invited to sit on the jury for the Un Certain Regard section.
Cannes has been outspoken in its criticism of the Islamic Republic’s repression of filmmakers, with the festival calling the imprisonment of Iranian director Saeed Roustaee a “serious violation of free speech” in 2023. Roustaee received a six-month sentence over his film Leila’s Brothers, which depicts economic struggles in Tehran and screened at the 2022 edition of the festival.
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