Iranian dissident filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof (There Is No Evil, The Seed of the Sacred Fig) had to flee his home country to evade an eight-year prison sentence last year. But in an interview with THR, the auteur shared that he is considering a return.
“Over the 15 months I have been spending out of Iran in exile, as I’m sure you’ve followed, so many bizarre events have taken place in Iran and at such an unparalleled speed that my main question right now is not which script should I start shooting, but what should I do?” Rasoulof shared in a conversation during the 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival via a translator. “Should I stay here [in Europe], or should I go back to Iran?”
The City of Locarno on Monday bestowed a new award on Rasoulof, the inaugural Locarno Città della Pace Award, or “Locarno City of Peace Award.” Created in collaboration between the city and the film festival, it is designed to honor a commitment to peace, diplomacy and dialogue.
Does Rasoulof not fear prison or other punishment if he goes back to Iran? “I do have such fears. It’s only natural as a human being,” he told THR. “But what really concerns me at the moment, more than just being confronted by my own fears, is how I can stand up to this regime. What is the best way? Is the best way to return to Iran despite all the risks it might entail, or is it better to stay here and work on a new film?”
He does have three scripts, written by him, ready if the opportunity to make a new movie presents itself. “One, I actually wrote in 2012, and I’ve had a producer attached who is waiting for me to get started,” Rasoulof shared. “Another one, I wrote around 2022, 2023, that period where I was living in my country and in and out of prison, and I couldn’t do very much really, so I wrote a script. And the last one is a story that really moves me and that I’ve just been working on more recently.”
Asked about the themes he is exploring in these film scripts, Rasoulof said: “They relate to the work I’ve done before. They are connected, but I try never to repeat myself and keep innovating. In these three scripts, the main locations are in Europe and in the United States, but they all have very much to do with Iran.”
His film Sacred Fig, won a special jury award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and was in the running for the best international feature Oscar, submitted by his new home, Germany.
During his time in Berlin, he also premiered his play Destination: Origin, which brought him back to stage work after about 30 years. Featuring the actresses from Sacred Fig, Niousha Akhshi, Mahsa Rostami, and Setareh Maleki, who also had to leave Iran for Germany, it deals with the challenges of migration and opening up to a new culture, while trying to retain your own culture.
“It debuted a couple of months ago in Berlin, went very well, and is still touring,” Rasoulof told THR. “It was a very good experience, because it related closely to the actresses’ experience of immigration.”
Locarno Film Festival artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro on Monday lauded the Iranian filmmaker for his work “that can be understood as a hymn to human dignity,” adding: “And only out of complete respect for human dignity can a renewed spirit of peace arise.” The jury said the inaugural peace award was going to “a remarkable creator of poetic and political cinema, whose work powerfully and profoundly explores themes of freedom, individual responsibility, and human dignity.”
Rasoulof is one of several big-name Iranian film creatives attending Locarno78. Iran-born actress Golshifteh Farahani received the Excellence Award Davide Campari on the picturesque lakeside town’s Piazza Grande square on the fest’s opening night. She got the honor from Zar Amir, who stars in the opening film In the Land of Arto from director Tamara Stepanyan. Also, dissident director Jafar Panahi is presenting his Cannes Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident at the fest.
If Amir and Farahani are still in town, Rasoulof said he’d look forward to meeting up with them. With Panahi, he has already made plans for a get-together. “Jafar and I are not just colleagues. We have shared so many deeply bizarre experiences,” the filmmaker told THR. “I am very curious to see him again after 15 months. I can’t wait to reconnect, because we spent two periods in prison together in Iran. We basically lived together in one small cell, sitting together for over six months.”
Rasoulof hasn’t seen It Was Just an Accident yet but will do so in Locarno. “I can’t wait. We have arranged things so that I can watch it here on the big screen” on the town’s Piazza Grande.
Rasoulof ends the conversation with another thought: “This might feel a bit private, but what I would say is that I realize that the sense of belonging and being deeply rooted within one culture is so much more complex than what you’ll ever be able to portray through cinema, through art. You might be able to tell a story to indicate some facets, but there will always be things that kind of drop from your hands. And so I realize that I’m not free in the sense that freedom is something bigger than what we can do within a country with a group of people. At the same time, so much is happening in the world that as much as you try to be free and resist, the events around us are of such a scale that it’s very difficult not to feel powerless.”
