Bible Movies - 26 - The Stoning of Sorya M - HD 

She is drenched in blood and crumpled on the ground, mutilated face partially obscured by a mass of dark hair. Over an excruciating seven-and-a-half minutes, she has been disowned by her family, buried to her waist in a hole at the centre of the village square and finally reduced to tattered rags of flesh by a baying mob hurling stones. Now, tentative, her husband bends to examine her face. The filmy eye blinks. He recoils. 'The bitch is still alive,' he shouts. There is a roar of fury and the crowd close in. 

It is the gut-wrenching finale to a deeply shocking film. On the night I saw The Stoning of Soraya M, some simply could not watch. Later director Cyrus Nowrasteh tells me that there are always walkouts. ‘But they all come back,’ he said. ‘They want to know what happens at the end.’ 

In person, Nowrasteh is immaculately dressed, gently-spoken and mild-mannered. He seems an unlikely candidate to direct a film that some critics consider a rather sophisticated form of torture porn. And then there are the repercussions. The Stoning is set in Iran and, needless to say, the Iranian authorities are not impressed. ‘They condemned it and then banned it,’ Nowrasteh shrugs. ‘Though I think some Iranians have seen it and people are definitely discussing it. I’ve heard reports about bootleg copies and a woman wrote to me and said everyone was talking about it when she went to the hairdressers.’ 

She is drenched in blood and crumpled on the ground, mutilated face partially obscured by a mass of dark hair. Over an excruciating seven-and-a-half minutes, she has been disowned by her family, buried to her waist in a hole at the centre of the village square and finally reduced to tattered rags of flesh by a baying mob hurling stones. Now, tentative, her husband bends to examine her face. The filmy eye blinks. He recoils. 'The bitch is still alive,' he shouts. There is a roar of fury and the crowd close in. 

It is the gut-wrenching finale to a deeply shocking film. On the night I saw The Stoning of Soraya M, some simply could not watch. Later director Cyrus Nowrasteh tells me that there are always walkouts. ‘But they all come back,’ he said. ‘They want to know what happens at the end.’ 

In person, Nowrasteh is immaculately dressed, gently-spoken and mild-mannered. He seems an unlikely candidate to direct a film that some critics consider a rather sophisticated form of torture porn. And then there are the repercussions. The Stoning is set in Iran and, needless to say, the Iranian authorities are not impressed. ‘They condemned it and then banned it,’ Nowrasteh shrugs. ‘Though I think some Iranians have seen it and people are definitely discussing it. I’ve heard reports about bootleg copies and a woman wrote to me and said everyone was talking about it when she went to the hairdressers.’