With the aid of the mullah (who fancies Soraya, but she turns him down) he hatches a plan, powered by blackmail and coercion and underpinned by Islamic law. There’s little ambiguity: Soraya (Mozhan Marno), mother of two sons and two daughters, is good, dignified and beautiful, with cascades of pre-Raphaelite hair and lovely patterned hijabs, while her husband Ali (Navid Negahban, pictured right ) is a primitive brute with no redeeming features - even his clothes are nasty.Īli is infatuated with a 14-year-old girl and as he can’t afford two wives, getting rid of Soraya by falsely accusing her of adultery seems the perfect solution. There are no holds barred here: the stoning itself is gory in the quasi-erotic, long drawn-out style of The Passion of the Christ (in which Caviezel starred it also had the same executive producer). Unsurprisingly, the book was banned in Iran. The film is based on the book by Freidoune Sahebjam, a French-Iranian journalist who met the real Zahra, investigated Soraya’s life and death and wrote a bestseller about it in 1990.

But eventually he follows Zahra to her house - he is a journalist, after all - where she explains that as women can’t be heard under this regime, he must be her voice and tell the world the terrible story of Soraya, her niece, who was schemed against by her adulterous husband and the village mullah and stoned to death only the day before. The mullah and the mayor chase the woman off, dismissing her as mad. The film is shot in a nameless Arab nation (though in the interview Nowrasteh mentions Jordan) - undisclosed to avoid local reprisals. Director Cyrus Nowrasteh, who wanted to show Sharia in action because, as he says in an interview, most Westerners 'just don’t get it', is an American-Iranian whose family escaped Iran after the Islamic revolution. Jim Caviezel, who plays the writer, is the only non-Iranian in the cast.

These first words, which she wants no villager to understand, are the only English ones the rest of the dialogue is in Farsi.

Watch the stoning of soraya