Award-winning director Nanfu Wang (One Child Nation, Hooligan Sparrow) talks to Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni about their acclaimed feature doc about Iranian Sara Shahverdi, who, as the first elected councilwoman of her remote Iranian village, fearlessly breaks patriarchal traditions by training teenage girls to ride motorcycles, and by stopping child marriages.
The film is short-listed within the Documentary Feature Category of the upcoming Academy Awards.
Opening the conversation, Wang wanted to know about the decision-making processes surrounding the visual look of the film, and the conversations the filmmakers had about the film’s cinematography.
“It’s hard when it’s a verité film, it’s really hard to plan things out,” co-director Khaki told Wang. “So we would just spend the night before each shoot [and] we would just anticipate…Let’s say, Sara and Fereshteh are going for this ride, what could happen? Or in terms of the election, these are the arcs of the story, and [these are] the points we want to cover.”
“But then also… several times being in production and shooting, we started to feel that there are some themes that…it would be nice to see their representation visually,” Khaki continues. One of these themes was the depiction of younger girls in contrast to the tenacious Sara who was at the centre of all activities within the village.
“There is this one moment where one of the young girls is about to get married, and she’s standing behind a lace curtain,” says Khaki. “We had a lot of footage of her in preparation to get married. But then in the editing, that’s where the theme of invisibility that we had discussed in production…came back, and we decided to just stay with that one shot of the lace curtain. And kind of let it represent that idea of the barrier between us and her, and that she’s walking from girlhood to adulthood…”
Cutting Through Rocks, which won the Sundance Film Festival – Grand Jury Award for World Cinema Documentary, is also produced by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, in association with Meadow Fund, Chicken & Egg Films, Secret Sauce Media, InMaat and P-Squared Philanthropies, and supported by, among others, the Sundance Film Institute, the IDFA Bertha Fund, the Bertha Foundation, the Hot Docs CrossCurrent Doc Fund the Doha Film Institute.
Click on the link above to watch the entire interview.
