This article examines how cinematic form renders coercion perceptible when its decisive acts are withheld from view. Through scene-based analysis of two films by Mohammad Rasoulof, There Is No Evil (2020) and The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024), it argues that off-screen space operates as a structural principle that disperses action across multiple agents and makes responsibility impossible to locate in any single figure. In There Is No Evil, coercion is broken into minimal gestures assigned to different hands through gestures such as pressing a button or pulling a stool, so that the act of execution remains distributed and unattributable. In The Seed of the Sacred Fig, institutional violence enters domestic space obliquely: a missing weapon, a family interrogation, a climate of suspicion that gradually reorganizes the home as an extension of the security apparatus. These formal configurations are inseparable from the conditions under which the films were made. Censorship shifts the decisive moment off-screen while multiplying the indices through which that moment can be reconstructed. What the spectator infers here is not only an action but a question of complicity, one the image refuses to answer on their behalf.

Authors:
Leila Peighambarzadeh, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada

About the Presenter(s)
Leila Peighambarzadeh is a PhD candidate in Semiotics and Film Studies at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and an affiliated researcher at IREF. Her research examines regimes of visibility and the representation of gender-based violence in cont

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https://linkedin.com/in/leila-peighambarzadeh-03933a1a4

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