Cutting through the patriarchy in an Iranian village
Daniel Nelson
In the opening shots of Cutting Through Rocks Sara Shahverdi is lifting heavy metal gates onto their hinges, cutting stone and driving her motorbike across a sweeping rural landscape. This woman means business.
Her business is the dangerous one of helping women escape from the grip of a traditional patriarchy in a remote Iranian village.
Her father had wanted a son to help with the farm, and taught her metalwork, building, driving and other skills denied to village women. Now she wants to spread the word.
As soon as the scene is set she is called into action. A brother has coerced her sisters to sign away their father’s inheritance. In a flash she’s on the phone to the brother, ignores his command to “stay out of this. It’s none of your business”, and drives to his house to sort him out. Which she does in short order. The “contract” is torn up.
“Sara started a coup d’etat,” declares one of the sisters happily.
But Sara has an even bigger coup in mind: standing for the local council. It’s unheard of, but she campaigns (“It won’t work well for us,” a group of men agree), wins and roars into action.
She quickly starts delivering action, including a much-delayed gas pipeline that connects houses on condition that male householders agree to share ownership with their wife.
She’s indefatigable. She gets a classroom of schoolgirls to sign a promise not to marry before they are educated, she re-designs a new car park, she encourages girls to learn to drive a motorbike.
It’s a revolution, decision by decision. Of course it provokes a backlash. Some men don’t like being over-ruled by a woman and are indignant about change, about girls and women going out, doing unwomanly things. They have no reasons (“She shouldn’t be out. That’s all”). They are frightened of losing power. They feel humiliated.
The traditionalists begin to fight back by trying to force her out of office and then, in a sinister escalation, getting a court to intervene on the grounds that she might not be a woman. It insists on a sex examination.
It’s a bitter battle, in which the court backs away from the charges but advises her to stop helping women, to ”mind your own business” and get married again (her first attempt — “I didn’t even wear a wedding dress” — ended in divorce).
It looks bleak for the 43-year-old, especially when she learns that most of the schoolgirls have broken their pledge not to marry. And a girl she saved from an unwanted second marriage to a much older man is been forced back to her family and wedlock.
But Sara Shahverdi the bulldozer still has petrol in her tank, and there’s another twist in the tale…
The film by married Iranian directors Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni provokes frustrated anger at the misogyny on display as well as happiness that there are individuals courageous enough to fight it despite male, societal, judicial and state opposition. Either way, it’s powerful, fascinating documentary.
Cutting Through Rocks opens at the Curzon Bloomsbury on 17 October