The horrific execution scene that got a film banned... and why the director hopes it will stop death row woman being stoned

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.’

Horrific: The character of Soraya (played by by Mozhan Marno) is buried to the waist in a hole in the village square and then pelted with stones by her family and neighbours Ordeal: The stoning sequence took six days to film and took its toll on both cast and crew

The Stoning has haunted Nowrasteh, an American with Iranian parents, for many years. Based on a book by journalist Freidoune Sahebjam, it tells the true story of Soraya, who was accused of adultery in a remote village in Iran in 1986. The charge was a complete fabrication concocted by her unfaithful husband – but she paid for his lies with her life. After the stoning, her bones were picked clean by wild dogs and then laid in the earth by her aunt Zahra. The villagers believed her story would be buried with her but Zahra had other ideas, risking her own safety to tell Sahebjam whose car broke down near the village shortly after the execution.

Soraya is played by Mozhan Marno, chosen because she is ‘beautiful and ordinary at the same time’, her aunt by Shohreh Aghdashloo, best-known for her role as Nadi in House of Sand and Fog. Jim Caviezel cameos as Sahebjam. The film, shot in a remote and extraordinarily beautiful village in Jordan, threw up huge technical and logistical challenges culminating in the horror of the execution sequence. There were no precedents as no-one has ever filmed a stoning in such unflinching detail before. It took six days and left cast and crew completely drained.

‘It was hanging over us the whole shoot,’ Nowrasteh says. ‘There was a very real sense that we were each waiting for our own execution towards the end. It only really affected Mozhan when she was put in the hole. She said it was just awful to be surrounded by this screaming mob.

‘Her reaction when the first stone hits and draws blood is extraordinary and completely spontaneous. You can see from her face that she simply cannot grasp what is happening to her – or how it can be happening.   

‘The question for me was always how far do you go? I didn’t want to have anyone mistake what they were seeing for standard movie violence. But I didn’t want it be so graphic that it overwhelmed the audience.’

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