![_The Preservation, The Dalles and SuperLiteBike at Beauty Ballroom [Show Preview]](http://austinist.com/assets_c/2012/05/the preservation-thumb-250x250-716401.jpg)
New Movie Review: The Stoning of Soraya M.
Whether you know someone serving in Afghanistan or Iraq, watch the news regularly, or just have seen a bunch of green twitter icons recently, you know that the Middle East is playing a bigger and more important role on a global scale. But how much do we know about these countries aside from the stock news footage we see? The Stoning of Soraya M. pulls back the curtain on some dark secrets of tribal Iranian law through the true story of one woman.
A French journalist (Jim Cazaviel, The Passion of the Christ) passing through a remote dusty village in Iran encounters Zahra, (Academy Award nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo, House of Sand and Fog), a local woman with a dark story to tell. In flashback we see Zahra’s niece Soraya (Mozhan Marno), and watch her tale unfold: her husband, in an effort to force her to grant him a divorce, accuses her of infidelity—a crime punishable by death. The local politics in the male-dominated society are strict. What legal recourse does she have to defend herself against this accusation?
This story is excellent and the performances are flawless, but more important is the way it opens up another world—a world we don’t often bother to notice or even try to understand. This is what makes it special.
Remember Schindler’s List? Remember that little girl in the red coat? For many in our generation, it was the first time we really looked into the holocaust and saw what it actually was. Suddenly it wasn't a war story told by an aging grandpa or a movie with John Wayne stoically munching on a cigar. It was real. It was something we had to think about. Schindler’s List addressed an uncomfortable subject, but it addressed it in an accessible, engaging way so that we were able to think about all the atrocities not just because we could but because we WANTED to.
That is something that makes Soraya M. so effective. It’s an amazingly clear and unflinching look into something about which we know very little. This film doesn’t just have a message, it has a plot. It doesn’t preach or wag a finger, it just lets you SEE. The film is good enough that we will WANT to think about it, in spite of how uncomfortable we might feel at times. It’s accessible AND Important.
In these times, we are looking at Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East in ways we never have before, if only because we are looking at them not as though they are just inkblots on a map but actual places full of real people like us. Whether outdated tribal laws and ritual stonings still take place today or this is just sensationalized storytelling, we have to think about it for the first time. it shows us a side we have never seen of Iran; and true story or not, the thoughts and feelings we have about it are real. No doubt it's time we actually did look a little deeper. Soraya M. allows that to happen.
