[Source: Reuters]

Exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof said on Friday that his Cannes Film Festival competition entry, about a court official’s family during his country’s 2022 protests, was born out of his own experiences with the justice system.

Rasoulof was in the French Riviera town to premier “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” almost two weeks after announcing he had fled Iran in the wake of his sentencing to eight years in jail and flogging.

His lawyer said the 51-year-old had been sentenced for statements criticising authorities and making underground films. Iran’s culture minister Mohammad Mehdi Esmaili told state media this month that Rasoulof’s new film had been made illegally and there would be a crackdown on movies without permits.

Rasoulof told Reuters in Cannes that the idea for the film had come to him after being arrested and detained several times. He has been charged with offences ranging from filming without a permit to “collusion against national security”.

“In the last few years I was interrogated so much, went to court, and in prison was so much in contact with the people who run the prison,” said Rasoulof, who won the Berlin Film Festival’s top award with his 2020 drama about capital punishment “There Is No Evil”.

“For me this question arose about the people who help this system run. What’s their mindset? How do they think? What sort of people are they?”

The film focuses on an investigating judge who grows increasingly stressed and paranoid as protests unfold across Iran over the death of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman arrested by the morality police for allegedly flouting dress codes.

At home, his two daughters push back against his tightening grip over their lives while his wife tries to back him up.

“I first came to Cannes 20 years ago, so my presence in Cannes is about the trajectory that I began and I’m very happy to be here today,” Rasoulof said.