Many classic Hollywood movies center on a miscarriage of justice, with a crusading lawyer saving the day. Much harder to portray are systemic injustices that permeate a whole society. But two 2024 films received considerable acclaim — including Oscar nods — for doing just that.
Making The Seed of the Sacred Fig (at Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury through February 20) was an act of courage. Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof was already appealing prison sentences for his criticism of the government in previous films. Not long after shooting this Tehran-set drama in secret, he was forced to flee his country, along with some cast and crew members. The Seed of the Sacred Fig won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and became Germany’s submission to the Oscars.
Like Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil (2020), this film deals with the use of the death penalty for dissent in Iran, but it goes further in its indictment by weaving real events and even real footage into a fictional drama. The story takes place during the protests against compulsory hijab wearing that erupted in 2022 after a young woman’s death in police custody.
Lawyer Iman (Missagh Zareh) has just been promoted to the role of investigator for the Revolutionary Court. His wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), and their two daughters, Sana (Setareh Maleki) and Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), are excited about moving to a larger apartment.
But if perks come with the job, so does scrutiny, as the family must exemplify strict religious values. At first, the changes in their lives are small: Sana can’t paint her nails, and Iman is given a gun to take home for protection. But then the protests transform Tehran’s campuses, drawing a stark line between the parents and their offspring, who watch government brutality unfolding on their phones.
When Rezvan brings home a wounded protester friend, Najmeh crosses that line to help her. Even Iman is deeply troubled by the death sentences that his new job requires him to sign without viewing the evidence. But when his gun disappears from the apartment, threatening his career, the once-tender father becomes an enforcer of tyranny in his own home.
Named for an organism that strangles its host, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a lengthy and sometimes chilling watch, much of it set in the cramped family domicile. While all the actors do powerful work, Golestani anchors the film with her meticulously detailed performance as Najmeh. Proud of her husband’s status, she insists early on that “Work is work,” claiming home as a sphere that need never be troubled by unrest. But events will pit her concern for propriety against her sense of justice — and, ultimately, against her maternal love.
Rasoulof’s camera finds poetry in Najmeh’s domestic rituals and in the care with which she tends to a bleeding victim. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is more successful as an intense chamber drama than as a thriller, with the tension taking several switchbacks before it rises to the eventual climax. Still, the film stands as a powerful statement against tyranny of all kinds and an eye-opening, important film for U.S. audiences.
Nickel Boys (at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier and starting Friday at Playhouse Movie Theatre in Randolph), based on Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, reminds us that systemic injustice is braided into American history, too. The story follows Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a bookish Black Floridian growing up during the rise of the Civil Rights Movement under the loving eye of his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). After he unknowingly accepts a ride to college in a stolen car, he’s arrested and sent to reform school.
At Nickel Academy, based on the real-life Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, hard labor and brutal punishment are the order of the day. Struggling to survive, Elwood finds an unexpected friend in fellow student Turner (Brandon Wilson), whose savvy cynicism clashes with Elwood’s faith in the ideals preached by Martin Luther King Jr.
It might sound like an inspirational prison buddy story, but in the hands of director RaMell Ross, who made the poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Nickel Boys is much more. Ross tells the story in first-person perspective: Rather than looking at Elwood, we see the world through his eyes, glimpsing him only briefly in reflective surfaces until later in the film, when the point of view switches to Turner and then alternates between the two boys.
This is no mere gimmick. Ross (who also cowrote) has such a keen eye for the surfaces of daily life, the eloquent details, that he creates a cinematic equivalent to stream-of-consciousness narration in literary modernism. We’re immersed in Elwood’s experience, but because that experience reaches us in fractured pieces, we also have to think actively about what we’re seeing.
Add archival footage, large time jumps and occasional surreal interludes, and the story of one boy’s life derailed by injustice balloons into an American epic about racism, resistance and resilience. Nickel Boys is a tough film, sometimes confusing on first viewing. But it rewards our attention in countless ways.
Both of these films challenge us to weigh the price of doing more than paying lip service to our ideals. When the pragmatic Turner advises Elwood that they can’t fight the system because the fix is in, Elwood replies with a hard-won insight that resonates: “If everybody looks the other way, then everybody’s in on it.”
This article appears in Love & Marriage Issue 2025.
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