By Emily Soper
This spring, the Rutgers Filmmaking Center’s Visiting Filmmaker Series gave students the opportunity to learn from a pair of Oscar-nominated directors: On April 10, Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmakers Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki visited Rutgers Cinema for a screening of their 2025 documentary Cutting Through Rocks, followed by a Q&A with our students, led by Documentary Film Lab director and Oscar-winning filmmaker Thomas F. Lennon. Lennon served as contributing producer and editing consultant on Cutting Through Rocks.
“When you start a documentary film, you don’t know how long you’re going to film—for one month, 10 months, for 10 years,” Eyni told the students. “So, it’s important to choose a subject that you think is really important—not just what the industry’s asking for or what audiences are looking for.” Cutting Through Rocks is Eyni and Khaki’s feature film debut.
Shot over the course of eight years, Cutting Through Rocks follows Iranian Sara Shahverdi, the first woman elected to her village council. A motorbike-riding, pants-wearing former midwife, Shahverdi is bold, charismatic, and unconventional in the eyes of her rural community.
“We knew that this was really an important story for us on a personal level.” Eyni said. “The story was mirroring our own experiences, of having a lot of obstacles and seeing a woman who’s fighting [to overcome them.]”
Shahverdi’s story of resilience and resistance was familiar to Khaki. Born and raised in Iran’s capital city of Tehran, recalls growing up with women like Shahverdi, including her sisters, and credits their perseverance with motivating her to make the film.
“I was always intrigued . . . by [women] who paved the way for the next generation,” she told the students. “When I came to the U.S., I found that inequality was a work-in-progress here, as well, and I started to wonder, for those who never left Iran, how are they pushing towards creating space for women and girls now?”
The film follows Shahverdi as she questions the boundaries of what women and girls can do. Over the course of the film, she teaches a group of teenage girls to ride motorbikes, intervenes in a proposed child marriage, argues with male family members in property disputes, and even comes face-to-face with law for her work. The film grapples with resistance to change and the ways in which Shahverdi is able to chip away at the village’s patriarchal systems—the start of a new path for the women and girls in her community.
“There’s something about this type of film—we’re not just talking about problems; we’re seeing a change, a solution,” student Owen Lam said after the screening. “There’s something empowering about a film that isn’t just victimizing these women, or showing them as, you know, completely helpless . . .. It’s really great to watch a movie like this, and to know that there’s a real fight, that they’re really putting the pressure on.”
Filmmaking student Sofia Ayyad says that the opportunity to see Cutting Through Rocks and to meet Khaki and Eyni provided her and her classmates with an important perspective for future filmmakers.
“Sometimes film programs can be a little America-centric,” said Ayyad. “It’s great to have filmmakers from around the world come visit. There’s a narrative that women in the Middle East need to be saved, or that they need regime change. It’s refreshing to see a narrative where the women save themselves.”
Image credit: Lynne DeLade
Watch the trailer for Cutting Through Rocks: