Iran’s rich cinematic history has yielded multiple Oscar wins in recent years for narrative/fictional work, as well as a 2026 nomination in the Best International Feature category for Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident. But an Iranian-made documentary had never earned an Oscar nomination – until this year.
Cutting Through Rocks, directed by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, achieved the Academy recognition without benefit of U.S. theatrical distribution. But it’s not as if the feature had flown under the radar, having won more than two dozen awards around the world including the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at Sundance.
The Iranian-born, U.S.-based filmmakers appear on the new episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, discussing the extraordinary protagonist of their film: Sara Shahverdi, a woman from a village in northwestern Iran who consistently defied her country’s intensely patriarchal culture. For one thing, she flouted custom by hopping aboard a motorcycle to get around – something almost unthinkable for a woman. She built her own house, did her own plumbing, and even more daringly, decided to run for a seat on the local town council. Which she won. No woman had ever done that.
The directors tell us how Shahverdi dangled incentives – like access to gas lines into homes – to get husbands to surrender a measure of economic control over their wives. She also encouraged girls to pursue their education – and to take up motorcycling. But her success also triggered a backlash that involved a spurious “investigation” into her gender.
Earlier in her career, Shahverdi served as a midwife, delivering hundreds of babies. And in a curious twist, she played the role of matchmaker, in a sense, for Khaki and Eyni. The directors began work on Cutting Through Rocks as colleagues, but a romance kindled and marriage followed — a happy union for which Shahverdi takes credit.
That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
English (US) ·