By: Deena Guzder
In Southwestern Iran, roughly
thirty-five miles outside of the city of Kerman, lies the small village of
Kupayeh. In 1986, French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam's car
unexpectedly stalled on the steep, narrow roads zigzagging along Kupayeh's
austere mountain ridges, stranding him in the wind-whipped village. Walking
among the sand-dusted brick houses, Sahebjam is accosted by a desperate woman,
Zahra, who feverishly relates a terrifying village conspiracy involving
blackmail, misogyny, and murder. Zahra tells the journalist that she, as a woman
in Iran, no longer has a voice and she pleads with him to "take her voice" and
tell the world her story.
www.thestoning.com
Speaking into Sahebjam's tape
recorder, Zahra recounts the tragedy of her 35-year-old niece, Soraya, who was
stoned to death for the crime of adultery, a crime that she did not commit. In
1994, Sahebjam exposed the village's dark secret in his best-selling book,
The Stoning of Soraya M.: A True Story. In 2008, Director and co-writer
Cyrus Nowrasteh adapted the film into a movie by the same name. Stoning
will be released domestically on June 26. The film already had its world
premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was the runner-up
for the Audience Choice Award.
Related through husky-voiced
Zahra (Academy Award nominee, House of Sand and Fog's Shohreh Aghdashloo),
Stoning centers on Soraya—a beautiful woman with wavy black hair that
cascades down her slender shoulders—and Ali—a brooding, abusive husband smitten
with a child-bride. Ali wants to trade Soraya in for the younger woman, but
realizes he cannot support two wives. Soraya refuses Ali's offer of a divorce
because she depends on her husband's income to support their four children.
Vindictive against his spirited wife and lustful over a 14-year-old potential
bride, Ali spreads a vicious rumor that his wife is having an affair with a
recent widower. Needing two witnesses, Ali blackmails a faux-mullah—by
threatening to denounce him as a previous collaborator of the Shah—and the
widower himself—warning that his mentally disabled son could be sent to an
institution. Under Iran's Islamic law, adultery is punishable by stoning, but
such sentences were only common in the early years after the 1979 Islamic
revolution that toppled the pro-Western government and brought hard-line clerics
to power. Iran's reformist legislators have advocated abolishing death by
stoning as a punishment for adultery, but opposition from hard-line clerics has
quashed their efforts.
The town mayor in Stoning,
Ebrahim is partially savvy to Ali's political machinations and partially
willfully ignorant. Ebrahim declares, that under Islam law, "women are guilty
unless proven innocent and men are innocent unless proven guilty," to which
Zahra retorts, "Right, all men are innocent and all women are guilty." While
Stoning issues a strong indictment of Iran's double-standard for men and
women, the movie is not anti-Islam. Stoning exposes the perils of
violence rooted in religious righteousness; however, the film also depicts
religiously inspired acts of great courage. Zahra positively evokes Islam when
she speaks Truth to Power—telling Ali that "God is watching" him spin his web of
lies—and later repeatedly exclaims "God is Great!" to a crowd of villagers as
she helps the journalist escape with her story on a cassette.
Setting hard primary colors
against shades of sepia, Stoning plays with light filters to visually
divulge the tenebrous world of village politics, a world that systematically
disenfranchises women. The film's most indelible scene is eerily prosaic. Young
boys roam the barren landscape for fist-sized stones. As the boys rap the stones
against the unpaved ground, the beating intensifies, like a thunderous drumbeat
heralding impending war. Donning a pristine white bridal gown, Soraya is
escorted to her death by a fiercely protective Zahra amidst a blood-thirsty
crowd. Soraya's last words are not a plea of innocence, but a condemnation of
mob-mentality and the practice of stoning. Director and co-writer Cyrus
Nowrasteh depicts every gruesome detail of the execution, in which Soraya is
buried to her chest with her arms bound, and bludgeoned with jagged rocks from
close range until she bleeds to death.
A scene of
The Stoning of Soraya M.
with Shohreh Aghdashloo
Only a person with a heart of
stone could fail to recoil in horror during the film's brutal finale. However,
one hopes the film is not mistaken for a denunciation of Iran at a time when
U.S.-Iranian relations remain strained. The film should renew outcry against not
only death by stoning, but also death by lethal injection, fire squad, and
electric chair. We must abolish the death penalty in all its nefarious forms
whether in the remote, landlocked corners of Iran or in the sanitized charnel
houses of the United States.
Warbling sound to foretell
tragedy and depicting brutality with the same gruesome attentiveness as "The
Passion of the Christ", the film aims to arouse moviegoers' furor. Yet, let us
not forget that international human rights groups have long lambasted the use of
the death penalty not only in Iran but across the world. Let us hope that
Stoning reignites global protests against the arrogance and inhumanity of
the death penalty everywhere.
In Iran, women
disproportionately suffer from executions by stoning; in the United States, the
poor and the non-white disproportionately receive death sentences. As Amnesty
International notes, "by working towards the abolition of the death penalty
worldwide, Amnesty International USA's Death Penalty Abolition Campaign looks to
end the cycle of violence created by a system riddled with economic and racial
bias and tainted by human error." While the U.S. has sanitized the horror of
killing people through lethal injections and electric chairs, it has not washed
its hands of the accompanying guilt. Iran must unequivocally renounce the
barbaric act of stoning people to death, and the U.S. must similarly make a
commitment against destroying human life.
About the author:
Guzder has reported for Time Magazine, Mother Jones, United Press International,
and other publications on human rights issues across the world. She is the
author of a forthcoming book, currently scheduled for release by Chicago Review
Press in 2010. Please visit:
www.deenaguzder.com
... Payvand News - 06/06/09 ... --
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