CANNES, France, May 25 — Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof recalled how he had to decide within hours whether to go into exile or serve a prison sentence, saying it was still difficult to talk about it during a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival today. Rasoulof was in the French Riviera town for the premiere of his new drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig , almost two weeks after announcing he had fled Iran and entered into exile in the wake of his sentencing to eight years in jail and flogging. After he learned that he had a week left before his sentence would be implemented, things moved quickly, he said, especially as authorities had caught wind of the existence of his new film.
“I had to say to myself, well, do I want to be in prison, or should I leave Iran, geographic Iran, and join the cultural Iran that exists beyond its borders?” recalled the director. “It took me two hours to take the decision. I walked around, I paced around my house.
I said goodbye to my plants that I love, and I have many, many plants in my house,” he added. Then, Rasoulof left all his belongings and walked out of the house. “It’s not an easy decision to take.
It still isn’t easy even to talk about it today with you,” he told journalists. Iran’s culture minister Mohammad Mehdi Esmaili told state media this month that Rasoulof’s film had been made illegally and there would be a crackdown on movies without permits. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is about a court official who.
