Sara Shahverdi doesn’t look like your typical councilperson, riding a motorcycle around town in “Cutting Through Rocks.” In Iran, she doesn’t fit the mold at all simply due to her gender, being the lone female representative out of 300 villages to hold office, but for whatever unique perspective she might have as a woman, it’s her attitude that sets her apart, no-nonsense and self-assured to a fault after her own father’s disappointment at not having a son led to raising Shahverdi as if he did in terms of building up her resolve with lessons on the bike and how to build things.
Co-directors Sara Khaki and Mohammad Reza Eyni are smart enough to know from following Shahverdi what her eventual adversaries do not – that it’s best to simply get out of the way in a fittingly unfussy yet poignant profile of an unlikely but exceptional leader who resents the fact she’s an anomaly. There aren’t many screen introductions as bluntly effective as the opening of “Cutting Through Rocks,” which sees Shahverdi settle a dispute within her own family with stunning haste after one of her brothers attempts to leverage the dispensation of an inheritance to strip the female family members of their rights going forward. Shahverdi will have none of it and although Kahki and Eyni don’t draw a straight line to any political ambitions, it’s clear she won’t be intimidated by anyone.
When Shahverdi does start telling people she’s running for office, she doesn’t shrink from all the old men around town who have no problem casually telling her to her face they won’t vote for her and she has a unique pull amongst the electorate, having been a midwife who delivered half the village’s population, if not more over the years. The campaign isn’t a major part of the film despite how groundbreaking it is, but instead what resistance she faces once in office for simply being herself, immediately chastised for taking a celebratory selfie with fellow council members complaining that she was trying to prove a point as the only woman in a room full of men and eventually drawn into an absurd yet serious inquiry into whether she’s biologically a woman.
Blessedly, Shahverdi isn’t portrayed as a saint, prone to be overaggressive at times and bound to be needlessly disappointed in herself when she can’t immediately implement all the systemic reforms she wants, but she does ingeniously see an opportunity when she’s in control of the equivalent of zoning permits in her village and can induce husbands to share ownership to their homes with their wives. She also assumes responsibility for a 12-year-old named Fereshteh, who is already moving through the process of a divorce and her parents agree to have her live with Shahverdi rather than remarry her as her father initially wants. The progress that Shahverdi makes on both fronts allows Khaki and Eyni to effortlessly show all that still remains to be overcome in terms of achieving equal rights in the region when women are reluctant to accept ownership for their homes even after Shahverdi does the difficult work of negotiating for it and her conversations with Fereshteh, comparing their adolescence to one another and how she found her independence, suggest that it’ll take such individual heart-to-hearts to create a sustained demand for parity over generations.
“Cutting Through Rocks” is the rare film to cover such a spectrum while honing in on an individual moment for its subject and it carries itself with the same confidence, elegantly chronicling Shahverdi simply doing the work as much as she’s allowed to. Shahverdi only appears stronger as setbacks pile up and when it’s her small incremental accomplishments that look as if they’ll have the most impact, Kahki and Eyni’s modest observational lens of her making history is most powerful.
“Cutting Through Rocks” will screen again at the Sundance Film Festival on January 28th at 5:20 pm at the Megaplex Redstone, January 31st at 10:30 am at the Holiday Village Cinemas, and February 1st at 12:15 pm at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in Salt Lake City. It will also be available online from January 30th through February 2nd via the Sundance virtual platform.