A fearless woman challenges tradition and fights for progress in rural Iran, proving that one voice can spark change—even against the steepest odds.
This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.
Sometimes all it takes is one person to make a difference. And progress is progress, even if it’s hard won and rife with frustrations.
These are the two most enduring messages of Cutting Through Rocks (اوزاک یوللار), which won the Grand Jury prize in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance this year. The film follows Sara Shahverdi, a divorced, free-spirited woman who becomes the first councilwoman of her remote and conservative Northern Iran village.
Directed by Sara Khaki and Mohammad Reza Eyni, a wife and husband team who spent many years with Shahverdi, as well as her family and neighbors, Cutting Through Rocks offers an intimate portrait of a determined woman whose election campaign and subsequent work on the all-male council leads her on a difficult but crucial journey.
The film begins with Shahverdi negotiating a conflict between her family members; her three brothers forced her six sisters to sign a document handing over their inheritance. (Their father died when Shahverdi was 16.) Furious, Shahverdi confronts her brothers, eventually getting them to agree to drop the matter; she tears the document in pieces much to her sisters’ relief.
This incident is symbolic of ones to come: Sara Shahverdi is a mostly well-liked and respected renegade who gets things done. Allowed by her father to choose her own clothes and go places where usually only boys were allowed, Shahverdi grew up riding motorcycles and doing construction projects. Later, as a midwife, she delivered hundreds of babies, including many of the village’s children, teens and young adults.
When she determines to run for council, some men tell Sara Shahverdi not to waste her time; they tell her that she’s an exception, but she cannot be the norm. But, at a speech to several dozen women early the in film, Shahverdi broadly asserts that other girls and women should have the power to change their lives.
“My heart aches when I see an 11-year-old girl who already has two kids,” Shahverdi declares. “She has no education. She has no choice in the direction of her life. She didn’t have a childhood. She should have gone to school. Instead, she becomes a housewife.”
Shahverdi asks the gathered women to raise their hands if they’re truly happy. Almost none do.
Shahverdi wins the election with the highest number of votes for any council member. Yet it’s once she’s in office that we start to see the true enormity of the problem she and other women in the region face. During Shahverdi’s visit to a middle school classroom, the girls proclaim they want to change the culture of their village and fear being married off or forced to drop out of school. She encourages them to wait to marry in their 20s and go to college, and the girls eagerly agree. But when she returns a year or two later, most of them no longer attend school.
Individual girls also seek Sara Shahverdi’s council.
One, Fereshteh, married at 12 to a 35-year-old man, is pursuing a divorce at 16. Sara does her best to help her, even allowing the girl to live with her until her court date and trying to intervene with the girls’ parents, but, even so, Fereshteh’s future is uncertain.
Another girl, Zahra, comes to Sara at her mother’s urging; her mother wants Zahra to prioritize studying over marriage. And yet, Zahra’s uncle, who punishes her for riding a motorcycle when Shahverdi attempts to let a few girls blow off steam by teaching them how to ride, pushes back on Sara Shahverdi’s ways with this piece of old-school misogynist “wisdom”: “Give girls shoes, but not paths.”
A few months later, Shahverdi receives an invitation to Zahra’s wedding.
Shahverdi must also contend with her village’s infrastructure projects: the construction of a park and the laying of fuel lines for direct service to people’s houses, among others. She helps friends and neighbors complete paperwork. She advocates for wives who have no access to property rights.
Despite her presence as a joyful, practical and fearless person whom everyone seems to respect and like, Shahverdi struggles with her health due to exhaustion and must defend herself against a spurious legal complaint alleging that she’s corrupting the villages’ girls and isn’t behaving the way a real woman should.
An atmospheric film that fluctuates realistically between hope and strife, Cutting Through Rocks offers a dynamic slice-of-life portrait of the lives of women in rural Iran. While Sara Shahverdi may still be an exception, the film powerfully demonstrates that if one woman can move the needle forward on gender equality, all girls and women can, too—if they’re only given a chance.
