The Oscars have two dueling foreign language films highlighting the effects of authoritarian regimes in a family dynamic. Both I’m Still Here and The Seed of the Sacred Fig are nominated for Best International Feature, but only I’m Still Here is nominated for overall Best Picture and I think Fig has been overlooked due to the former being based on a true story.
I’m Still Here is a Brazilian film based on a 2015 memoir of the same name by Marcelo Rubens Paiva. Marcelo is one of the children of Rubens Paiva and Eunice Paiva, and the film shows the immediate aftermath of the father’s kidnapping by Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1971. Fernanda Torres as Eunice is the heart of the film playing a mother trying to keep her family together and safe in the wake of her husband’s disappearance. It’s quite a moving film and an important story to be told, but it’s especially good Oscar Bait for two reasons:
- It’s based on a memoir. A traumatic narrative about a real person (or real family in this case) tends to gain visibility whether the movie itself is the best of the bunch or not.
- Fernanda Torres plays Eunice Paiva for most of the movie, but Fernanda’s mother — Fernanda Montenegro — appears toward the end of the film as an elderly Eunice. Back in 1998, Fernanda Montenegro was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, becoming the first Brazilian woman nominated as well as the first actress nominated for a Portuguese-language role. Oscar voters love a narrative like that.
To me, the film itself is more important than it is actually good. The pacing is off, the final two acts are not needed, and the efforts to make the viewer invested in the family just feel like padding to make the movie longer. I don’t care about the oldest daughter’s winter coat. It’s a solid movie and I understood the buzz after I saw it, but I didn’t leave thinking it was one of the best movies of the year.
Fast forward a week.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig was playing nearby for a few days and I popped in during my lunchbreak one random midday (not realizing this film was 2 hours 48 minutes, so I absolutely overshot my workday break window).
Now that was a movie experience, an exploration of a family dynamic during an authoritarian regime, and a fuck you to fascism. From one scene to the next I had no idea what was going to happen, and whereas I’m Still Here only succeeds on the strength of Fernanda Torres’s performance, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an ensemble where everyone had to show up to work. These are performances that made me look up the actors to see if there were other films I might be interested in watching.
From a narrative standpoint, it’s not based on a memoir and it isn’t a true story, but it very much so incorporates the very real protests and police brutality of the 2022/2023 Iranian protests. The flashpoint of the protests was a college student who was brutalized and subsequently murdered for wearing her hijab improperly. Throughout the film, we see real news footage of the violence through the eyes of two main characters following the increasingly tense situation on social media. These two liberal, progressive daughters are in contrast to the father who is working for the government. In the middle, Mom is trying to keep peace.
Partway through the first act of the movie, the family of four is sitting down to dinner watching news of the violence. The daughters, who have been following on social media and who have friends in the middle of the protests, say the news is lying. The father, whose job it is to uphold the unjust policies of the regime, says the girls don’t know what they’re talking about. The mother wants her husband to be respected while she also wants to support the daughters that she loves.
This scene could have played out in Tehran, in Tampa, in Kabul, in Kenosha — anywhere a generational (and gender!) divide has split families into progressive children and conservative parents. It’s probably my favorite scene of the year because it’s so specific to Iran and what happened in 2023, but it’s also universally applicable to so many families across the world right now. It’s fantastic filmmaking.
Past the experience of seeing the film, the experience of learning about the film makes Fig an even more important piece of art. Remember, I’m Still Here is set in the 1970s. Brazil has already made attempts to right those wrongs and apologize to the families affected. The Seed of the Sacred Fig takes place in 2023. Iran is not apologizing to anyone because Iran is still working to suppress the truth of what happened to the extent that everyone involved had to make this movie in secret. Director Mohammad Rasoulof has been fined and sentenced multiple times by the Iranian government for previous films and had just served a prison sentence for criticizing the regime. Actually, he didn’t serve it fully — he was released early due to poor health, and while he was out, he decided to shoot a movie critizing the regime for the whole world! So, the cast and crew shot this movie over 70 days during the winter of 2023/2024.
After submitting the film to Cannes, the government rounded up all of the cast and crew, including Sohelia Golestani (cast as the mother) who was already on Iran’s radar for protesting the hijab and the oppression of women. Everyone involved with the film was interrogated and banned from leaving the country while Rasoulof was sentenced to flogging and eight years in prison. Rather than wait around to be arrested, Rasoulof escaped from Iran with other members of the cast and crew, a journey through small towns that took nearly a month. He smuggled the prints out of the country to do the remaining editing in Germany, which is why it’s the German submission for the Academy Awards. When Cannes rolled around, Rasoulof held two photos, one of Golestani and one of Missagh Zareh (cast as the father) as the two of them were unable to escape from the country.
When we’re talking about meaningful art, art that makes a difference, art that has something to say, I feel like the Fight Fascism movie that took place 30 years ago doesn’t have the same impact as the Fight Fascism movie that took place last year while the creators are still on the run from their homeland for showing the world actual news footage of what is taking place in their country.
I’m Still Here is a serviceable family drama about a very important period of Brazil’s history that isn’t often told. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an explosive look into the current regime of an insular country that would rather torture its citizens than let them create a movie about the reality of living in Iran. If you saw I’m Still Here and you connected with the message, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an opportunity to do it again in support of people still dealing with the immediate fallout.
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