Shortly before he was to be flogged and imprisoned for eight years, Mohammad Rasoulof fled Iran.
His weeks-long journey would take him from Tehran, through rural Iranian villages, on foot across a mountainous borderland and ultimately to Hamburg, Germany.
As arduous and dangerous as the trip was, Rasoulof’s travels had an added wrinkle: he was trying to finish a movie at the same time.
A week after arriving in Germany, Rasoulof would premiere his film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, at the Cannes Film Festival in France.
The feeling of that void has not hit me yet, and I think it may never come
“I remember when I was sitting in the car that was driving me to the border,” Rasoulof says. “I had my laptop and I was taking notes and sending them to my editor. The two friends who were taking me kept saying, ‘Put that thing away for a second.’”