Best movie ever!

Absolutely brilliant

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

The movie starts out with Soraya M. already dead. Her aunt is cleansing her bones in the river for burial. A stranger comes to town who is a French Journalist who speaks Arabic. He is desperate to get out of Iran under the recent takeover of the Ayatollah. His car has broken down and a woman , Zahra, Soraya's aunt, confronts when with a graphic tale on how the men of the village misused Sharia law to stone Soraya M. to death. She even was able to tell him about things that happened in private conversations in which she wasn't present. (Makes for a better drama by filling in those gaps.) Soraya is wrongfully accused of adultery by her husband who coerces another man to be his witness.Several things are brought out in this movie. One is that women lived better under the Shah dictatorship than Sharia law. The elders of the community have invoked Sharia law because it appears to be the wish of the Ayatollah and Allah, and it is convenient for them. The movie is an emotional roller coaster. The stoning scene is graphic and is done that way for a reason: to show you how barbaric it is. It is an emotional tear jerker that will leave you both angry and sad. English subtitles.

First of all, I must address the people who are objecting to the film based on its Islamic inaccuracies. Now, it is unfair to single out the film or the book for being inaccurate and based on that to declare that such an incident never took place.To begin with, I must point out the errors made in fulfilling the requirements for it to be conducted under the traditional and mainstream Islamic guidelines, the two most glaring:1. The widower, the man who, after being threatened by Ali, admits/lies to having sexual relations with Soraya, too should have been punished. There's no escape for him for having admitted to the crime.2. The Hadd punishment, to be loosely translated as (the) "maximum" (punishment), cannot be carried in such a case. For cases such as this, where the person accused is not caught in the act of actually having a sexual intercourse, or if the number of witnesses are less than required to carry the Hadd punishment. So it is instead the Tazeer punishment that is to be resorted to, and the Tazeer punishment can never be death penalty since, as explained above, the maximum punishment can't be carried. The Hadd punishment of course is not always the capital punishment, and in cases where it is not, the Tazeer punishment is becomes even less.However, this doesn't mean that these things don't happen at all. I very well remember an incident in Pakistan back in 2009 where in Swat a girl was lashed 40 times or something, yet the man she was accused to be engaging in with "Indecent behaviour" was not punished. In fact, I can dig out many, many cases where a woman alone was punished for adultery. So people who aren't ready to believe the story just because the Islamic requirements for a trial weren't followed are trying to act too smart, but in one way or the other are showing lack of awareness of how things run in certain countries.Commenting on the punishment alone, I just can't think of too many crueler methods of putting someone to death. This is just plain inhumane and has no place in any progressed and developed society.Coming to the film, only I know how I managed to hold back my tears watching the scenes where she is firstly pelted by her father, and then by her two sons. Too painful, just too horrific! A great injustice and tragedy! I had a lump in my throat for hours afterwards. This film is brilliantly made in my opinion. Kudos to the people who brought this story to a film.This by the way was the first film ever that I watched of which the language I was not familiar with, and thus had to completely rely on the subtitle. English, German, Urdu and Hindi being of course the languages that I know.

The Stoning of Soraya M. is a 2008 movie based on a true story from 1986 in Iran. A French journalist also wrote a book about it. The book was banned in Iran. More than a dozen websites say the movie was financed by Blackwater's founder Erik Prince. Weeks before the movie was released, Huffington Post reported, "That stoning still occurs today is proof too few understand its barbarity or frequency." There is also the tiny matter of this stoning victim's innocence. As if her unjust and barbaric death penalty is not horrific enough, layer in her husband having 1) turned her eldest son against her, 2) openly cheated on her 3) hatched a plan to falsely accuse her of cheating on him and 4) blackmailed a neighbor into corroborating the false accusation. Then, Iran's justice system (Islamic Sharia law) held and concluded her trial - without her in attendance. Also, in Iran, as Ebrahim said to Soraya's aunt, "When a man accuses his wife, she must prove her innocence. That is the law. On the other hand, if a wife accuses her husband, she must prove his guilt. Do you understand?"Soraya's aunt responded with, "Yes, it's clear, all women are guilty, and all men are innocent."All of these injustices culminate into the final atrocity: each family member and entire community participate in these stonings. Each member throws stones. Hundreds of stones were thrown until their impact killed her. She was defenseless because she was half buried alive. Her hands were bound and the top half of her body was left exposed.

An Iranian journalist based overseas stumbles upon a horrific tale of fear, ignorance and mob brutality when his car breaks down in a remote village.Taking this tale, based on a true story, and transferring it to screen throws up a number of challenges. Stoning people to death is barbaric and there is no justification for it. But it happens, and for a reason, and the film admirably sets out to show why. It avoids the trap of being an educational film, explaining in exposition the sociocultural reasons for such events, by staying focused on Soraya's plight and the inexorable unfolding of small episodes that lead to the stoning. There are, thankfully, no ironic or sub-textual references to Iran, patriarchy or Sharia law made. Another aspect of this approach is the Hollywood characterisation and plotting. The is unsurprising given the film school the director graduated from, but it takes this viscerally repellent event and somehow puts a genre stamp on it. This is most glaringly revealed in the journalist's action-movie style escape from the village, including a piece of trickery with a tape that invites us to high-five with the fleeing journalist, a tone that is out of place since we have just spent quarter of an hour watching a woman being stoned by her friends, neighbours, and family. The characterisation works in the sense that it is familiar - the amoral man of God, the dithering village leader, the corrupt and forceful husband, the compromised village idiot - but also jars, in that these characters are archetypes of Hollywood drama fiction, and as enjoyable and successful as they are in such an arena, they seem like interlopers here. Perhaps I wanted the film to feel more documentary like, or take an unusual approach such as Hunger did to the Bobby Sands story. I cannot articulate the engagement with this topic that I wanted to see, I just feel this wasn't it.Acting is excellent, especially Shohreh Aghdashloo as Zahra, Mozhan Marnò as Soraya M., and a chilling Navid Negahban as instigator husband Ali. I suspect the film will survive more in the university classrooms of Culture Studies departments than the pantheons of cinema, but it is a film worth watching nonetheless.