The exiled director’s story of officialdom’s misogyny and theocracy in his home country may be flawed, but its importance is beyond doubt

Mohammad Rasoulof is a fugitive Iranian director and dissident wanted by the police in his own country, where he has received a long prison sentence and flogging. Now he has come to Cannes with a brazen and startling picture which, though flawed, does justice to the extraordinary and scarcely believable drama of his own situation and the agony of his homeland.

It’s a movie about Iranian officialdom’s misogyny and theocracy, and sets out to intuit and externalise the inner anguish and psychodrama of its dissenting citizens – in a country where women can be judicially bullied and beaten for refusing to wear the hijab. The Seed of the Sacred Fig begins as a downbeat political and domestic drama in the familiar style of Iranian cinema, and then progressively escalates to something extravagantly crazy and traumatised – like a pueblo shootout by Sergio Leone.