Today, Explained - The messiest Oscars category

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

The Seed of the Sacred Fig was (secretly) shot in Iran with Iranian actors and an Iranian director. But it’s Germany’s submission for Best International Film. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members An Oscars ad at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood with a portrait of Oscar host Conan O'Brien. Photo by Barbara Munker/picture alliance via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Oscars are this Sunday and of all the films nominated, only one of them was filmed in secret. It's called The Seed of the Sacred Fig. It's about an Iranian family at odds with each other over the country's repressive policies. It was shot in Iran, it's got Iranian actors, it's got an Iranian director, it's very much about Iran, but it's Germany's submission to the Oscars. The director of this movie, Mohammad Rasuluf, is in exile, but we caught up with him in New York City to ask him what it's like to make a movie secretly and why Germany is repping this super Iranian movie. We're doing the Oscars. You're a superhero. If this is how intense Nova Kane sounds, imagine how it looks. Is there more?

Yeah, big time. Nova Kane, only in theaters March 14th. Friendly reminder, your taxes are due soon. Sorry to scare you, but it's true. If you are dreading April 15th like the rest of America, listen to this week's episode of Networks in Chill, where I cover all things taxes and show you that yes, it can be confusing, but I promise we can get through it together. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on the Your Rich BFF YouTube channel.

You are listening to Today Explained. I'm Mohammed Rasuluf. You can tell me Mohammed. That's just about all the English we got out of the seed of the Sacred Figs director. The rest of our conversation was done through a translator who was with him in his New York City hotel. We started with the craziest thing about this movie, that it was shot in secret in Tehran. Well, of course, the power structure in Iran, the Islamic Republic, is a despotic and repressive regime, and it has implemented widespread censorship on all parts of the society.

It does not allow any voices that are critical of it to be heard, voices like myself who make critical movies. And so this is why the film had to be made in secret, because we are trying to get our voices out, and they're not allowing the voices to be heard. When people in our audience hear that this movie was filmed in secret in Iran, they might imagine, oh, there were a lot of interior shots, you know, scenes set inside buildings,

scenes set inside apartments, whatever it might be, that's how you film a movie secretly. But I was surprised when watching it that there are indeed shots of, you know, this family that the movie is about eating dinner outside of a restaurant, you know? There's shots of people driving around Tehran. How do you do that secretly? Obviously you have cameras when you're filming outside. Yes, of course, at first we had limited equipment and we had to be inside and have interior shots. But gradually we learned how to be seen

and how to have the exterior shots. It's like wearing clothes, you try to protect yourself that way. The underground cinema in Iran tries not to be seen and tries to have films that are not impacted in their quality by the fact that they are underground. This movie, The Seat of the Sacred Fig, it follows a family being torn apart, a father who's part of the sort of establishment in Tehran and his supportive wife, and then their two daughters who are unhappy with the system and eager to join young women protesting in the streets. And it's very much set during the Massa Mini protests from a few years ago.

Why did you want to set a movie during those protests and how did you come up with the idea for this family where all of the tensions we were seeing in the streets in Tehran were sort of manifested in this family unit? As you said yourself, this is a story of a family who live together, whose members live together, but they think very differently from one another. This could be a difference of generations, it could be the fight between tradition and and modernity, but the women's movement in Iran is very old and it's not only contained to the women life freedom movement. Of course the backdrop of this film is the movement of women in Iran which is very much

rooted. But this movement also shows the awareness of the new generation and their way of use of the world as a network these days through social media and through the internet. Where were you during those protests? In the year 2022, it was the last time that I was arrested and I had been in prison when the movement happened. It was a few months into my arrest and I was following the events of the movement in prison. What were you in prison for? For my previous films and for what I had written on social media about social and political events. And that's why you not only filmed this movie secretly, but you were also directing it remotely.

You weren't allowed to make a movie in Iran, so you were never on the set of your own movie. How does that even work? The most important complication was how I was going to direct from a distance. I was constantly watching a monitor when I was afar and the monitor was on set. And I also had two assistants who were present on set. One of them was my liaison with the actors, with the artistic team, and the other was my liaison with the technical team, and I was communicating through sound.

Everything that was happening, I could hear, and I could tell them what to do through sound. And technically, it was a little difficult, but we got used to it as we went on. And in the end, we ended up having a very good and close collaboration. And some of the scenes actually, it worked better. But the other complication I had was how to keep my focus. I was under a lot of pressure, I was really stressed out and at any moment

Anything could have happened. So we were always in a state of in between hope and hopelessness And now you very well may Win an Oscar for this film that you shot in secret remotely in Iran. But of course, the country that wins this Oscar, if it indeed wins, is Germany. Why is it Germany? Yes, of course. Well, when I was in jail and I was released, My family was in Germany and I no longer could work in Iran.

I no longer could make films and I decided that I had to leave because otherwise I had to go to jail and play the role of the victim and I did not want to be a victim of the censorship. So I decided to leave Iran through the mountains, through a very, very difficult trip. And after I got to a neighboring country, I contacted the German consulate and they knew that my family was in Germany. So they helped me travel to Germany. And in addition to that, my post-production

all happened in Germany, the editing process and my actors after they left Iran they also went to Germany and they started living there. The budget of the film also partly came from Germany but there is also more meaning to this for me. People who chose to nominate this film on behalf of Germany to the Oscars gave a very strong message to the other filmmakers outside and that is that there is always going to be hope for filmmakers who are working under a lot of pressure. And I also think that the film has a similar fate to my own fate, and that is because I'm an Iranian, I'm traveling with German documents,

and so is the film. The film was made in Iran, but it is now traveling around with German identity and documents. Mohammed, thank you so much for joining us. I'm not in the Academy, but I hope you win an Oscar on Sunday. Thank you. Muhammad Rasuluf, you can call him Muhammad. His translator was Shadda Diani. The movie's The Seed of the Sacred Fig and it's nominated for an Oscar for Best International Film. But some say Best International Film is the messiest category at the Oscars. We're going to find out why when we're back on Today Explained.

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You can visit VoxMedia.com slash S-X-S-W to learn more. That's VoxMedia.com slash S-X-S-W-R. This week on Profit Markets, we speak with Mike Moffitt, founding director of the University of Ottawa's Missing Middle Initiative and a former economic advisor to Justin Trudeau. We dive into the state of Canadian politics and we get his take on the biggest challenges

facing Canada's economy. Canada's economy is like three oligopolies in a trench coat. We have a lot of inequality that way. We have high levels of market concentration because we have this tension in Canada where we want things to be Canadian. We want Canadian ownership. But when you do that, you create a moat. And whenever you create barriers to entry,

you're going to naturally create oligopolies. You can find that conversation exclusively on the Prof G Markets podcast. And the Oscar goes to... Sean Rames from Today Explained here with Nate Jones from Vulture, where earlier this month, you published a piece titled, Is There Any Way to Fix Oscar's International Film Category? What's wrong

with it, Nate? So there are a couple things wrong with the international film category. So basically how the international film category works is that the award does not go to a director, it does not go to a filmmaker, it goes to a country. And so the way it works is that every country in the world submits one film. So dozens, sometimes hundreds of countries, they submit their films to the Oscars and you only get one. So if there's two great films from Switzerland in one year, doesn't matter, only one. The second big issue is that the people deciding

who submits these films to the Oscars are not Academy members. They are often artists, but often government ministers from overseas governments. And so one of the things you quite often see often government ministers from overseas governments. And so one of the things you quite often see in the best international film race is that any film that is sort of remotely critical of certain governments from certain countries just have 0% chance of getting it.

Unless, as we are seeing this year, they can kind of get rescued in a way by just sort of the lucky hap-estance of being co-produced by a country that is not the film they are set in. So that is what's happened with Seed of the Sacred Fig where, you know, they're quite lucky. I was talking to an Oscar strategist last week that they said, you know, the Academy is super duper lucky that that film had a German production company so that it was able to be submitted by Germany because it would have been just a terrible look

if this very well-acclaimed film with this amazing story behind it just couldn't get nominated for the Oscars because it was too critical of its own government. Like, that's a bad look. Okay, so some of the issues we're talking about here include that countries can only submit one movie. Who decides which movie that is?

Anything else that's like sort of a sticking point in the international feature category? There's also kind of the nagging question of, does it make sense to identify specific films with specific countries anymore? Like as we're seeing with Seed of the Sacred Fig, it is an Iranian and German co-production. There's an amazing film that wasn't submitted by India called All We Imagine is Light that was an Indian-French co-production. Amelia Perez is a film that, you know, takes place in Mexico, has an international cast, but was filmed in France. So it is the French submission.

Are you English? No, I'm not English. Why? No, because you are pretty. The modern world of cinema is so blurred in terms of international boundaries that sort of pinpointing a specific film and saying this specific film belongs to this specific country Doesn't always make sense. How modern an issue is this at the Oscars? Is this like a twenty twenty five concern or was this always an issue in the history of this category? This is an issue that's come up in the past I want to say like 15 years in response to another problem that they used to have say like 15 years, in response to another problem that they used to have, which was that films had

to take place in the language of the submitting country. You know, you can see all the ways that that would kind of run into issues. You know, if you make a film about immigrants in say a European country and it is mostly told in the language of the country that they came from, suddenly that movie is not eligible to be nominated. They got rid of that rule in the late 2000s,

which I think was a good change to make, but then now downstream of that, we have this other kind of weird situation. I know the Oscars, the Grammys, all these big award shows, they do institute change when there's a big enough controversy. You know, the Oscars have gotten a lot of flak for, like, women directors not getting nominated,

and now they're trying to do better. The Grammys have gotten a lot of flack for, like, women directors not getting nominated and now they're trying to do better. The Grammys have gotten a lot of heat for not being diverse enough and now they're adding lots of diversity to their academy. Has there not been a big enough controversy in the international film category to, you know, institute some changes here or have there been some over the years? Well, it's interesting. I think one of the things that we are seeing is a result of the reforms that the Academy made to their membership.

On behalf of the Academy, congratulations to all the nominees and Oscar winners. You are part of a community that spans a century, not just a Hollywood community or an American community, but a global one, filled with storytellers, domestic and international, one that is becoming more inclusive and diverse with each passing day. So if you remember, in the wake of's So White, the Academy really expanded how many people it invited per year. I think it's now about half of the membership has been invited since 2016. And if you remember the headlines for them expanding the membership, it was we are going to get a lot more women in and we're going to get a lot more people of color in.

And then kind of in a little asterisk below them it was, and we will also get a lot more international voters in. But as we've seen in the results from the past decade or so, the international voters are the ones who have had the biggest, most obvious effect, where it is now sort of no longer a surprise that a foreign language film would get nominated for Best Picture. In fact, this year we have two nominated for Best Picture for the first time ever.

Just because there's so many more international voters, that has kind of increased the salience of the international film category, where it used to be that category was kind of a little sidebar to the main competition. And now increasingly what we're seeing is films that are competing in international film, they are competing all across the ballot. You know, Emilia Perez, the French submission, led the field with 13 nominations. And as we saw last year, not getting selected doesn't doom you. There was a little controversy last year over Justine Triest's Anatomie Vafal, which was a very popular, critically acclaimed French film, won the Palme d'Or, but was not selected as the French submission.

You complain about the life that you chose. You're not a victim. Not at all. Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner. And there was a lot of scuttlebutt over why that was. People think it was because the director criticized Emmanuel Macron in her Palme d'Or acceptance speech. But anyway, it wasn't selected, and that kind of turned out to not really matter much. It still got nominated for best picture. It got nominated for best director at one screenplay.

So, you know, it still did very well. But in general, yeah, what we are seeing is like, the best international film category is kind of like a handhold on a rock ledge. And, you know, you start from that, and then you kind of move up into these other categories. You know, I'm all of a sudden remembering when Parasite won Best Picture.

And the winner is a movie from South Korea. What the hell was that all about? The once and current, once again, president actually had some thoughts about it. We got enough problems with South Korea with trade. On top of it they give them the best movie of the year. Was it good? I don't know. And said that Hollywood had lost its way if a foreign movie were winning Best Picture.

Did he have a point? It's funny. I'll put it this way. That opinion is certainly shared by some old guard members of Hollywood. And they make the point that every country kind of has its own Oscars. France has the Césars, Spain has the Goyas. And the Césars and the Goyas don't give out all their awards to American and British films. So they're like, these countries have their own awards. Why can't the Oscars be for American films? And I understand that. And it is a debate that has happened, honestly, throughout Oscar history. It goes back as far as, you know, the 1940s, when you would have British films. I believe it was Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet won Best Picture in the late 1940s. Or in that sleep of death,

what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil. The winner, Hamlet, J Arthur Wright, two cities famous. You saw very similar complaints where people said, how dare they? We helped them win the war and then their movies come over and steal best picture from us. So this is a debate that has been going on for a while. But what

I say when people bring that complaint up to me, my point is that I don't think it diminishes the Oscars to include the best films from world cinema. I think it enhances them. I think it sort of adds to the reputation that like, no, this is the big one. Like this is the World Cup of award ceremonies. And I think that only makes the power of the Oscar even more strong. Hmm. Okay, well, it doesn't sound like there's gonna be

too much dramatic change in the best picture category anytime soon, but if we were to rejigger best international film to function better, what could we do? What are the options? I think there are a couple things you can do. The main argument the Academy has for keeping the one country, one film rule is that they are kind of worried, understandably, that voters would get very Eurocentric, that you just have two films from Italy, two films from France, and maybe one film from Taiwan. One solution that I thought of maybe was that we already have, there's an academy committee,

it is a self-selected committee of people who have worked in international films, and they are the ones who narrow down the 80, 90 submissions every year into a 15-film shortlist. And so I say, why not put those people in charge of also determining what the best film from each country would be? It sounds so common sense that you wonder why the Oscars don't just do that. Why don't they do that? What I have been told is that they see it as empowering the other countries. It's like the Olympics or the World Cup.

The people who run the World Cup, FIFA, do not tell Germany what players to select for their team. I understand that logic, even though, you know, I like my way. I think it's good, but I can understand why they think that. I wonder, is anyone up there making the case that we just don't even need this category anymore? Because as you're pointing out here, you've got this sort of international bleed into the best picture category.

Do we still need to have a whole category for movies that, you know, aren't English language? I do think that we need this category, if only because, you know, I just said that there are two films in this year's field nominated for Best Picture. Usually there's only one. Sometimes there's zero. And so I think having this category still lets a film

like Sea to the Secret Fig, which was not nominated for Best Picture. You know, this is a place to celebrate that film. And yes, I think, you know, in a perfect world, we'd have a totally equal playing field, and people would, you know, slot in international films in their mental headspace alongside Hollywood films very easily. But you know, we don't live in a perfect world. And so I think it's good to kind of have this little place that lets Academy members sort

of gives them a window into what's happening outside the US. us. Nate Jones, best supporting writer at vulture.com, best producer goes to Abhi Shai Artsy, best deputy Jolie Meyers, best senior researcher Laura Bullard, and best mixing is going to be shared by Andrea Christensdottir and Patrick Boyd. Oh, and the Oscar for Best Ensemble. Why doesn't that Oscar exist? Hattie Mawagdi, Devin Schwartz, Gabrielle Burbae, Victoria Chamberlain, Travis Larchuck,

Miles Bryan, Amanda Llewellyn, Amina Alsadi, Miranda Kennedy, and best host goes to La La Land. No, sorry, sorry, it's Noelle King. This is Noelle King, the best host. Today Explained is distributed by WIC. The show is a part of Vox, which FYI is an independent news source. That means we don't worry about serving the interests of the powerful. We just worry about serving you. And we rely on you to help fund our work. If you want to support us, you can go to Vox.com slash members and sign up today. Thank you a million and thank you to the Academy.