(L–R) Rebecca Lichtenfeld, Mohammadreza Eyni, Sara Khaki, and Judith Helfand attend the premiere of “Cutting Through Rocks (اوزاک یوللار)” at The Egyptian Theatre in Park City. (Photo by Andrew W. Walker/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Jordan Crucchiola
In a remote village in northwest Iran, there lives a woman named Sara Shahverdi. She is divorced, has no children of her own, and lives by herself. Shahverdi is the exception to so many gender norms in her community, including her distinction as the first woman ever to be voted onto the local council. Now, she is also at the center of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinematic Documentary Competition film Cutting Through Rocks (اوزاک یوللار), which is also this year’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary honoree.
“I used to live in Brooklyn working as an editor, and I wanted to tell a story of a woman who never left her country, and stayed in her village, and wanted to make a difference, and stand for the rights of the women and girls,” says director Sara Khaki during the post-premiere Q&A on January 27. “Through extensive research I came across Sara [Shahverdi]’s story, and when we found out that she was running for a council seat, I had to drop anything I had going on in Brooklyn and come back to my home country after 15, 16 years.”
The woman Khaki found is a figure seemingly made for capturing through cinema. Cutting Through Rocks opens with Shahverdi repairing a metal gate on her property, literally cutting through a stone wall with a saw to make it swing correctly. We then see Shahverdi riding her motorbike alone — already a signal of defiance — through farm lands where she is framed in heroic silhouette against the setting sun. Soon after this beautiful opening, we see Sara getting into a shouting fight with her brother over his attempts to strong-arm their family’s shared inheritance away from their sisters, to keep it in the hands of the brothers alone.
The viewer understands immediately why a documentarian would put her entire life on hold to travel around the world and film a person like Shahverdi. Over the course of the movie, we see Shahverdi receive more votes than any other candidate in her local council election; try to intervene to halt underage marriages for young girls; increase property ownership for local women; and confront a barrage of attacks from the men around her who are threatened by her authority in the community.
After finding her subject, Khaki connected with the person who would go on to co-direct and co-produce Cutting Through Rocks with her, the filmmaker Mohammadreza Eyni. “I’m from the community, so I know the language, traditions, everything, so it was a good collaboration,” Eyni explains. “And also, we decided to marry in the process!” A marriage is fun and exciting news, but the union of the two directors was also the only way Eyni and Khaki could have accomplished what they did with the documentary: Neither alone could have gained access to villagers of the opposite gender from themselves, and establishing trust among the community — with the help of what Eyni calls “the magic of [Shahverdi]’s presence” as their facilitator — was a months-long and delicate experience in and of itself. Completing Cutting Through Rocks was a seven-year endeavor.
Eyni says how, if he were a woman, it would not have been possible for him to have stayed in Iran and become a film director, so he feels a sense of responsibility to create space for the voices of women and girls who aspire to lives that differ from what they’re expected to do by tradition and male elders. Working among this community for seven years also made witnessing the harsh realities for their female subjects especially difficult. Just as we see some of the young girls in Cutting Through Rocks experience hope for something different with Shahverdi as a role model, they are often beaten back, sometimes even physically, away from dreaming any bigger.
Shahverdi was unable to travel to the premiere due to visa reasons, but the directors hope she can join them for future screenings. For now, although her time as councilwoman has ended, Khaki tells the audience that Shahverdi’s tenure was “really successful,” and she is currently running a carpet-cleaning business in her village. Shahverdi realized that women who kept house all day spent so much time doing daily chores that this service would be valuable in alleviating their workloads. The audience is thrilled to hear from Khaki that, “Sara right now is doing really great.”
