Oscar Hopeful Mohammad Rasoulof, Director of ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig,’ Sets Animated Feature About Iranian Revolution

variety.com:

Ben Croll “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” director Mohammad Rasoulof has shared new details of his upcoming animated feature, telling Variety that the project will span the life of absurdist Iranian playwright Abbas Nalbandian, beginning a decade before the Iranian Revolution and covering the country’s turn until the playwright’s death a decade later.

With this animated biopic, Rasoulof wants to focus on three pivotal decades in modern Iranian history – a period he feels he can only properly evoke with a more stylized filmmaking form. “Just before the revolution, all Iranians saw the face of Ayatollah Khomeini in the moon,” Rasoulof says. “Everyone in the country looked up and shared in this kind of collective hallucination – and that’s something you can only show in animation.” Of course, animation is also a method to get the filmmaker-in-exile back onto the streets of Tehran.

Indeed, now based in Germany, and speaking with Variety from the Marrakech Film Festival, the fugitive filmmaker has no immediate plans to return to his native Iran – but he won’t stop telling stories from his home country. “I’m an Iranian director,” says Rasoulof. “I’m inspired and nurtured by my community, by the society that I love and know well, and by my language.” As he carves out a new path in exile, the filmmaker will take inspiration from recent films of the Persian diaspora, looking toward to Farsi-language titles like Ali Abbasi’s “Holy Spider” (shot in Jordan) and Matthew Rankin’s “Universal Language” (shot in Canada, and representing that country as its International Feature Oscar selection this year), while pooling talent and themes from a more global community. “We are also a very large community living abroad,” says Rasoulof.