Festival de Cannes 2024, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig and The Most Precious of Cargoes

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The Festival de Cannes presented The Seed Of The Sacred Fig by Mohammad Rasoulof and The Most Precious of Cargoes by Michel Hazanavicius.

©YesICannes.com

Festival de Cannes 2024 : the last day of competition saw the screening of The Seed Of The Sacred Fig by Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, who fled his country clandestinely, deprived of his passport by the theocratic regime and threatened with a long prison sentence; he reached Europe after a complicated and dangerous journey. The Most Precious of Cargoes, Michel Hazanavicius’s animated film, adapted from the book by Jean-Claude Grumberg, is evoking the Shoah.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig ©DR

Challenging the totalitarian regime of the mullahs

Mohammad Rasoulof, sentenced to a whipping and eight years in prison by the theocratic regime for “colluding against national security”, and deprived of his passport, managed to flee Iran to be finally – he and his film The Seed Of The Sacred Fig – given a standing ovation on the Croisette. It’s very difficult for filmmakers to challenge the mullahs’ totalitarian regime from within – refusing to flee the country – and to continue making films despite being banned from shooting a single frame!

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Story of a familly in Tehran

The Seed Of The Sacred Fig tells the story of a family in Tehran during the protests that followed the murder by the morality police of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died for “wearing a wrongly set veil”. The film includes video footages published on the Internet showing the unbearable brutality to which young Iranians (especially women) are subjected.

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Protest inside and outside

No budget for the director of A Man of Integrity (2017), Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013) and Au Revoir (2011), who plunges into the intimacy of a middle-class family living in the capital. The father has just been promoted to the post of investigator in a revolutionary court and has to sign numerous death sentences, the two daughters are studying, one at university, the other still at high school, and the mother is trying to keep the family together in the dwelling between the religious father and his young daughters, who blame their mother’s submissiveness as much as the violence suffered by their sisters in the street during the demonstrations. Protests are brewing both inside and out… The father’s pistol goes missing and the family’s fragile equilibrium is shattered despite the mother’s desperate efforts, while demonstrations and bloody repression continue, with one of the eldest daughter’s friends falling victim!

Mohammad Rasoulof ©YesICannes.com

Protests both inside and out

Protests are brewing both inside and out… The father’s pistol goes missing and the family’s fragile equilibrium is shattered despite the mother’s desperate efforts, while demonstrations and bloody repression continue, with one of the eldest daughter’s friends falling victim!

©DR

Great cinema despite lack of resources

Despite the lack of resources, Mohammad Rasoulof has succeeded in making a great film, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats in an exciting behind-the-scenes encounter between youth and a thirst for freedom and a heavy-handed, macho Islamic tradition, illustrating the frustration of Iranian society in the face of dictatorship and the ayatollahs’ totalitarian censorship of the slightest innovative idea – undermined by the viral videos made possible by the widespread use of mobile phones, which show the horror of the repression of a fairer future brought about by women.

The Seed Of The Sacred Fig ladies ©YesICannes.com

Violence brodacast on Internet

The videos circulating on the Internet in Iran bear a striking resemblance to those circulating in France about the repression and police violence initiated by Macron during the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations and protests against his decried pension reform. The difference is that in Iran people are enucleated with buckshot and not LBD… Fortunately, the seeds of the fig tree strangling the oppression have been sown! Just be patient…

The Most Precious of Cargoes ©DR

The Most Precious of Cargoes

Michel Hazanavicius’s film is the first animated feature to be selected in the Official Competition since Ari Folman‘s Waltz with Bashir (Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film and César for Best Foreign Film in 2009). This tale of the Shoah is intended to stigmatise the horrors of the Holocaust through the story of a couple of poor Polish woodcutters living deep in a Polish forest during the Second World War who take in a “package” ejected from one of the many trains – on its way to Auschwitz – that criss-cross the snowy landscape. The poor woodcutter woman, lamenting the fact that she has no children of her own, discovers a baby whose parents have sent him off to avoid fatal fate in the industrialised death camps, so that he will survive. The worst in the human heart is followed by the best. A powerful, implacable and universal tale, denouncing the horror of genocide, in which Michel Hazanavicius, through his drawings, delivers a work intended as a “great classic”.

Laura Blajman-Kadar ©DR

Where was Israel at Cannes?

As in Lille for the Séries Mania festival, or in Cannes for Canneseries, apart from Gideon Tadmor and Emilio Shankar who walked the steps – Israeli producers of the American film Ho Canada, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Richard Gere and Uma Thurman – the only Israeli film presented this year was the short film It’s no time for pop by Amit Vaknin, a film student at Tel Aviv University. With a yellow ribbon hanging from his jacket – a symbol of support for the 250 or so people taken hostage by Hamas on 7 October – actor Philippe Torreton walked the Festival’s Red Carpet on Tuesday 14 May. Laura Blajman-Kadar, a survivor of the massacre perpetrated by Hamas terrorists in Israel on 7 October, walked up the Red Steps wearing a yellow dress decorated with photos of the hostages. The world was able to see some of the faces of the hostages still being held in Gaza, under the #BringThemHome banner. The Franco-Israeli woman wrote a book about her experience, Croire en la vie (published by Robert Laffont), published in March.