Dispatches from AFI Fest 2025: The Seed of the Sacred Fig and Cover-Up

Written by Joshua Silva, Edited by Lucia Perfetti

One man may give us a model for how not to give in to apathy in the face of global suffering: Seymour Hersh, a titanic figure in American journalism and the subject Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’ documentary Cover-Up — though the notoriously cantankerous Hersh seems to operate less out of empathy (at least not that he shows on his face) than out of a ceaseless drive to tell the truth, to the point where he almost seems non-ideological. The film chronicles in fairly conventional fashion Hersh’s career from exposing the My Lai massacre, to his contentious stint at The New York Times, to exposing torture at Abu Ghraib, among many other stories. 

Despite some of his oversights, which the film addresses with an appropriate open-endedness, Hersh is one of the few living figures in American journalism whom I’d call a hero (at times leading me to wonder how he hadn’t met the same fate as, say, Gary Webb). 

Here is a man who stared unflinchingly at America’s atrocities in Vietnam, atrocities which he and his generation grew up believing our country would never commit. 57 subsequent years haven’t brought a reckoning with American imperial crimes but have instead further eroded any faith or decorum in our foreign policy. Hersh reports on the US’s involvement in the Gaza genocide just as he did in Iraq and Vietnam, yet he reports them to a far more indifferent world, a world where photos showing even greater brutality than the My Lai massacre over-inundate our screens. 

Does Hersh then embody the lesson that the fight for truth and justice will always have to be fought, and — similarly to Paul Thomas Anderson’s take on resistance in One Battle After Another — that that is paradoxically the reason why it is worth fighting? It seems like too easy an answer, but perhaps it is one better suited to journalism and art than it is to politics. Politics is the practice of affecting change on a mass level. Journalism and art do the same, but more obliquely through the practice of truth-telling or lying, and unfortunately in both media it is far easier to spread lies. This is why the films that have seemingly had the greatest effect on politics and history are usually vile but potent pieces of propaganda (Birth of a Nation, Triumph of the Will), and conversely, why such a dogged veteran of truth-telling as Hersh has been banished to Substack. In the 70s, Hersh could still work for as mainstream an institution as The Times, yet one can trace a straight, unbroken line from The Times’ cowardly equivocation on the Gaza genocide to its whitewashing of the Nixon administration’s coup in Chile, a result of their foreign policy reporting coming directly from Henry Kissinger’s mouth. The film uses Hersh’s career as a lens to expose the historical rhyming of continuous power abuses and institutional lies. 

There have been a recent slate of political films whose urgency and — apologies for using such a trite word — timeliness seem to engender a lack of formal consideration: Mohammad Rasoulof’s Seed of the Sacred Fig, a well-plotted but visually unimaginative drama about the issue of women’s rights in Iran affecting the domestic life of a revolutionary court judge, drew plenty of attention upon its premiere for being shot in secret and for the directors imprisonment by and subsequent escape from Iran. The film intercuts its melodrama with real-life footage from the 2022 protests. Neon likely acquired it betting that it would win the Palm d’Or at Cannes, yet its resonance seemed to peak at that festival. When the production and distribution of a film become embroiled in politics, it automatically increases the resonance of the film, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to quality.  

The Voice of Hind Rajab, already notable for being unable to find distribution despite Brad Pitt, Jonathan Glazer, and Alfonso Cuaron boarding as executive producers, exists in a similar vein of what I’ll call “journalistic melodrama,” its fictionalization, even more evidently than in Sacred Fig, serving as a vehicle to emotionally enhance breaking news. Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s film tells quite sparely the true story of the Red Crescent Volunteer Call Center trying to save the five-year-old Hind Rajab, a girl in Gaza trapped in a car hit by an Israeli tank, among the corpses of her family members. After Israel murdered the paramedics who tried to save her, they murdered Rajab as well, firing over 300 bullets at her car. 

The film makes it very clear that what you’re seeing is as close to reality as a dramatization can get, using the real audio from Rajab’s phone call, having the actors in the call center recite their words from the phone call verbatim, and, in the film’s most formally interesting scene, showing the reenactment of a recorded video from the call center as a phone films the real-life video. 

The film positions itself more as a piece of social change than as a work of art; in the Q&A afterwards, the producer mentioned how she’s trying to organize a screening of the film at the UN. But by telling this story as straightforwardly as possible in an attempt to raise awareness through pathos, the film begs a morbid question: how could anyone, after two years of the most mediated genocide in history, possibly be converted to caring by a film? Yet in the discussion of “how to help” that followed the film, politics were conspicuously avoided. The name Israel was never uttered in the film nor in the following Q&A, which attempted to position the tragedy as a universal one. Granted, it should be of universal concern, but such language seems to attempt to appease those who want to help without taking a clear stance against Israel. In an attempt to broaden its reach, the film opts for a fairly simplistic angle on the genocide. 

Though Hind Rajab’s story must not be forgotten, the film surrounding it is little more than an elaborate way of restating that sentiment.