When a courageous and independent woman runs for the local council in a remote Iranian village, trouble from a conservative Islamic #patriarchy is not far away.
Cutting Through Rocks is an apt title for Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki’s affecting documentary.
It tells the remarkable story of Sara, a strong-willed, headstrong divorced woman in her mid-40s who is afraid of nobody.
Restless energy
Brought up by a father yearning for a son, from an early age, she was taught how to take care of herself, to build and fix things, ride a motorbike, and be independent and fearless. Married in her 20s – a day she recalls as one of the saddest of her life – she soon broke with convention in her conservative northwestern corner of Iran and divorced. Ever since, she’s been a stalwart #feminist, advising the women in her own extended family how to stick up for their rights.
When one of her brothers dupes her sisters into signing away their inheritance, she puts herself in the middle of a family argument, swiftly tearing the handwritten agreement to shreds. She castigates her brother, who can only weakly bleat: ‘This is none of your business.’
Full of restless energy, she decides to run for the village council. Elders, all men, sitting around toking on shisha pipes in a local café, mutter that she has no right sticking her nose into the affairs of men. But Sara knows no boundaries and launches an election campaign, where she garners the most votes and gains access to the prized village council seal. With seal in hand, she sets out to right wrongs, modernise heating and cooking through the installation of domestic gas supply pipes, and build children’s playgrounds. She seems unstoppable… but has not fully reckoned with the ancient power of tradition.
Ever since, she’s been a stalwart #feminist, advising the women in her own extended family how to stick up for their rights.
At first, there are complaints about her keeping the village Sela. One neighbour demands it as his right (as an elder), but she accuses him of simply wanting it to legitimise an illicitly built house and refuses. She invites young women to come to her home, where she talks about women’s rights, urges them not to marry too soon and asks what they want to do with their lives. They all want to be doctors or nurses, to study at university.
She takes in a young girl who has fled at the age of 16 from a marriage to a man her father’s age, contracted when she was just 12. The girl wants to become a midwife, just like Sara used to be, who has delivered 400 babies in the village over the years. She teaches the girl to ride a motorcycle and, with the permission of their parents, takes other girls for motorcycle rides across the windswept, gently rolling, treeless hills beyond the dusty outskirts of her village. When an uncle intervenes and slaps one of the girls, she reacts with fury.
Court summons
There is no dramatic music or faux build-up to what happens next, but one day Sara is summoned to court, accused by an unnamed neighbour of running a dishonourable house. The first question the judge asks is why she is divorced. Then her masculine sense of fashion is addressed. Before long, Sara is forced to submit to a humiliating medical examination as the judge considers whether she should undergo a sex-change operation. (The fact that such procedures are available in the #Islamic Republic# was a surprise to this reviewer.)
Sara’s very sense of self is violated, and she retreats home wounded and saddened, her only solace the two isolated trees her father had planted in his fields when she was young.
Her resilience does not allow her to lie low for too long. She passes the medical exam, and the judge eventually dismisses her case. She is older and wiser but not less determined to continue being a force for change than before. Only now she may take things a little slower.
With stunning photography in the austere environment of Iran’s remote far northwest, Cutting Through Rocks leaves a lasting impression.
