05 ISSUE IX
NOVEMBER 2025
NOVEMBER 2025
The Deep Structures of Resistance in Iran
“Cutting Through Rocks” portrays a rural Iranian woman’s political struggle and illuminates the deeper, decades-long social transformations driving today’s movements for gender equality in Iran.
By Atash Nowroozian
The Honda motorcycle, all too familiar to Iranian audiences, takes on a new image in “Cutting Through Rocks.” A woman strikingly drives it. Sara, a divorced former midwife, becomes the first councilwoman of her impoverished rural village in northwestern Iran, a place where women rarely own property and schoolgirls are often married off by their parents. Directed by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, the film goes beyond the conventional narrative of female empowerment familiar to the West, situating Sara’s struggle within the contradictions of a post-revolutionary theocracy, where women confront oppressive constraints and laws that fail to protect them.
Still from Cutting Through Rocks.
At its core, the documentary traces Sara’s political fight and the obstacles that follow her electoral victory, also examining her identity as an independent, divorced woman who assumes the role of provider for a family left without its patriarch in a society that rejects female autonomy. Her mentorship of village girls – teaching them to ride motorcycles, encouraging their education, and speaking out against child marriage – positions her as both a political actor and symbol of resistance.
The film alternates between her public and private life, as they come to mirror one another. Amidst her struggle to win a council seat, she intervenes in a dispute between her sisters and brothers, the latter of whom have coerced the women into relinquishing their inheritance. She tears up the documents in protest, declaring, “shame on him… why would he write such an unfair agreement?” Branded a rebel by her own family, Sara channels that sense of justice into her campaign, relying on the support of women and youth who long for change in a village where men still find it difficult to “be ruled over by a woman.”
Once in office, Sara translates her victory into action. She visits girls’ schools, speaks directly with fathers and husbands, and urges men to co-register their property with their wives to gain access to new gas lines, a quiet but radical act of reform. However, her attempts at progress provoke backlash. Male council members undermine her, her brother dismisses her authority, and she is even summoned to court over accusations rooted in her independence and nonconformity. “They have questioned my identity. They want to change me.” The film captures her frustration and exhaustion as she reflects, “They did everything they could to stop me from moving forward in life.” Through these moments, Cutting Through Rocks lays bare the emotional cost of defiance in a society that deems a woman incomplete without a man.
Beneath the intimate portrait of Sara lies a deeper history of social transformation in Iran. While global attention often focuses on urban images of unveiled women confronting state power in Tehran’s streets, the film redirects our gaze to a quieter but more foundational geography of resistance. Sara’s presence in the village council is, in this sense, not an anomaly but a direct continuation of that deeper revolutionary process. Her riding a motorcycle, contesting inheritance rights, intervening in early marriages, and demanding shared property ownership are not simply acts of personal rebellion, but expressions of a broader historical force that has been reshaping rural Iran for decades. The film highlights how these struggles address the most fundamental forms of oppression: ownership, education, bodily safety, and the authority of patriarchal family structures.
Iran’s revolution, often caricatured as chaos or dogma, appears here instead as a Hegelian rupture, a moment in which accumulated quantitative pressures, illiteracy, lack of infrastructure, and exclusion from political participation suddenly tipped over into a qualitative transformation of society. While the political transfer of power and the regime that emerged from the revolution represented its reactionary outcome, the deeper social transformations it set in motion – the very ones reflected in this film – belong to a different, more enduring revolutionary horizon. Long before any urban feminist slogans took shape, the revolution brought with it new mechanisms that fundamentally reconfigured everyday life: rural electrification, water and gas projects, new universities, the formation of local councils, and the ability of ordinary people, especially women, to participate in governance for the first time.
It is here, in these villages and margins, that the roots of “Woman, Life, Freedom” must be understood. The uprising was not born solely from urban defiance over the veil; its genealogy stretches back to the slow, painful, structural battles fought by women like Sara, who confronted not only the state but also the intimate tyrannies of family, tradition, and economic dependency. The film shows how the patriarchy is reproduced inside the home as much as in political institutions, and how resistance, therefore, must begin in those same spaces.
In this way, Cutting Through Rocks offers a nuanced explanation for why today’s nationwide movement resonates so widely: it is not feminism expressed through the tropes commonly celebrated in Western narratives; it is built upon the cumulative, unglamorous victories and defeats of women whose struggles preceded it by decades. By situating Sara’s fight within this long arc of social transformation, the documentary reveals that the most enduring revolutions are not always fought in the capital’s streets but in the daily, often invisible labor of women who challenge the foundations of their worlds. It underscores that revolution is not merely regime change or chaos; it extends far beyond that, reshaping the fabric of society and generating new discourses that continue to evolve.
atash nowroozian is an ma candidate in international affairs at the new school, with a concentration in security and conflict, focusing on the m.e.n.a. region.