The screening of an Iranian film at the Los Angeles Film Festival on Saturday became the occasion to debate the turmoil happening a half a world away, while serving as a timely reminder of the struggle for women's rights under Islamic regimes in the Middle East.
Based on a true story, "The Stoning of Soraya M." tells the tale of Soraya (Mozhan Marno), an innocent women entangled in an unhappy marriage who is falsely accused by her husband of having an affair with a man in their remote Iranian village.
Soraya's husband schemes with the town elders to make sure his wife is charged with the ultimate penalty - being stoned to death by the whole village. Her only hope and supporter is her Aunt Zahra (Academy Award nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo), who later boldly shares Soraya's story with a journalist passing through town.
In real life, that journalist was Paris-based Freidoune Sahebjam, whose book of the same name was the first to bring attention to the real Soraya, who was stoned and killed in 1986.
The film is at once profoundly powerful and deeply disturbing: the prolonged and graphic scene depicting stones being thrown at Soraya - bloodied and buried to her waist in sand - elicited audible sobs from the packed audience at the Mann Festival Theater.
"I've seen the real thing on tape and in comparison, the scene in the movie is nothing," said director Cyrus Nowrasteh, who sat alongside Aghdashloo and Iranian writer and scholar Reza Aslan on a panel moderated by "Kite Runner" author Khaled Hosseini immediately after the screening. "I just felt I had the responsibility to not water it down for the people who have died this way."
Shohreh Aghdashloo (pictured right), who received a standing ovation from the audience for her performance, said she immediately wanted to become a part of the film upon hearing about its subject matter because she had viewed an actual stoning on-tape years prior. She recalled the difficulty of shooting such an emotional scene - which took six days to film in its entirety.
"On the fourth or fifth day of filming the stoning scene, I had dust in my eyes, there were angry men stomping on the ground and everyone was chanting 'Allahu Akbar' ['God is great']. It became hard to tell what was reality and what was a dream," she said.
Reza Aslan explained that Islamic law has long struggled with stonings because they are not written about in the Koran. The culture has responded to this problem by making it nearly impossible to be convicted of adultery: one has to be caught during fornication by four men of "blameless integrity" who all witness the act at the same time.
"They've created these obstacles instead of legal scholars simply saying, 'this is absurd,'" Aslan said. "The issue at hand is really more about the way woman get treated - not religion, but women's rights. We're talking about cultural practices - not religion - because there is no such thing as religion separated from culture."
