CANNES, FRANCE — As a producer of "The Passion of the Christ," Stephen McEveety knows how difficult (and also satisfying) it can be to make a controversial, sometimes brutal movie about religion and faithfulness.
McEveety, who two years ago left Mel Gibson's movie company to start a production and distribution company called Mpower Pictures, is building on that experience, and his new film "The Stoning of Soraya M." explores some of the most contentious beliefs of fundamentalist Muslims.
Like "The Passion of the Christ," McEveety's new movie is not for the faint of heart. "The Stoning of Soraya M." is adapted from the 1994 nonfiction of the same name by the French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam, who traveled to a small Iranian village in the mid-1980s and came across the story of an innocent woman stoned to death over concocted charges of infidelity.
The film, which is selling to foreign distributors at the Cannes market and will be released domestically on June 26, is framed by the arrival of the journalist (played by "The Passion of the Christ's" Jim Caviezel) into the hillside town of Kupayeh. The Shah of Iran has been overthrown as part of the Islamic Revolution, and there's a resurgence of fundamentalist religious belief, which has reached the men of Kupayeh.
"What happened here yesterday was wrong," a woman named Zahra ("House of Sand and Fog's" Shohreh Aghdashloo) tells the journalist, before she relates the tragic events of what has happened to her niece, Soraya (Mozhan Marno). Soraya's husband was tired of his marriage and wanted a younger spouse; rather than pursue a divorce, he concocted a scheme to get rid of her.
The fabricated charge was adultery, which under the town leaders' judgment was a crime not only against her husband but also Islam. The penalty was death by public stoning, and nothing Zahra or Soraya could do or say would stop it. "It is God's law," one person says, while the local mullah says, "With each stone you throw, your honor will return."
Director and co-writer Cyrus Nowrasteh spares little in depicting the execution, in which Soraya is buried to her chest with her arms bound, and pelted with heavy rocks from close range until she bleeds to death.
"We had to keep toning it down so that people could bear it," says McEveety. "It was far worse originally. But there were people who wanted us to tone it down even more than we did."
