IDFA – Cutting Through Rocks Portrays How One Woman Opens the Road for Others
© Image courtesy of IDFA / Cutting Through Rocks
Stefanie Gordin watched Cutting Through Rocks at IDFA 2025, where the documentary ultimately won the Audience Award. What she encountered was a quietly powerful documentary — an intimate, steady portrayal of a woman pushing against the boundaries of her world.
Cutting Through Rocks has already travelled far beyond the landscapes it portrays, collecting awards across the globe – beginning at Sundance, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary. More recently, it earned a spot on the DOC NYC shortlist of the year’s best documentaries, and it went on to win the Audience Award at IDFA 2025. And it makes sense: this is the kind of documentary that moves with both precision and tenderness, carrying a story that continues to echo long after the credits roll.
In this documentary, Iranian American directors Sara Khaki and Mohammad Reza Eyni craft something at once intimate and expansive – sometimes heartbreaking, often deeply uplifting. They shape a beautifully calibrated portrait of the modern-day struggle for gender equality, told through a woman who simply refuses to be diminished.
From this broader canvas, the documentary shifts us gently into the world it inhabits. Rural landscapes roll by. A small town. An Iranian woman on a motorcycle. The documentary opens quietly, without explanation, inviting us into the everyday rhythms of a life that seems ordinary at first glance – until it isn’t. Soon we meet Sara Shahverdi: landowner, former midwife, divorcée, and a woman who cuts through rural Iran on two wheels with an unflinching conviction. Her existence alone challenges patriarchal norms. Her movement creates space.
From the opening scenes, Shahverdi stands her ground. We watch her confront her brother who tries to cheat his sisters out of their rightful inheritance. Not long after, she announces her candidacy for local office. She moves through the community in her car, visiting homes, speaking with women, asking them whether they are truly happy, whether they want change, and reminding them that change demands participation. Her presence alone is an act of resistance.
“A motorcycle is like a human,” she says at one point. “It faces hardship sometimes. Life is like that.” Shahverdi’s voice carries the clarity of someone who has had to explain the world to others, and survive it herself. The documentary is peppered with such lines, moments where language becomes a tool for teaching, consoling, awakening. But it is also punctured by sentences that wound. One relative, speaking of a young girl already married at the age of twelve and already divorcing, says: “Give girls shoes, but no paths.” It’s a devastating summary of structural inequality: even when girls are given “permission,” they are rarely given direction.
Yet Cutting Through Rocks refuses to collapse into despair. Hope lives in the girls who gather around Shahverdi, in the parents who slowly shift, in the women who begin to imagine themselves differently simply because they see her talk and ride. This hope, however fragile, is what carries the documentary into its next movement. We follow Shahverdi’s perseverance, her belief that major change is possible, her desire to reshape her community from the inside. But reality interrupts, as it always does. Some transformations never arrive. Others appear only in small increments. The documentary reminds us, gently but insistently, that small changes are still changes: sometimes they are the only ones that can take root.
Khaki and Eyni guide us through moments of joy, pride, and victory; moments of doubt, defeat, and the heaviness of daily life; the obstacles that refuse to move and the ones that shift just enough to create light. The portrait remains tender, even at its most politically charged. Shahverdi visits a local girls’ school, telling the students how essential their education is, urging them not to surrender to conventional expectations. She tells them they are the future – but also that the future isn’t automatic. It must be chosen, insisted upon, protected.
Later, when she returns to the school, reality cuts deeper: most of the girls no longer attend. Their paths have been predetermined, their choices narrowed, their futures negotiated without them. The weight of structural inequality becomes painfully clear, and it lands visibly on Shahverdi. Yet even in that heaviness, she refuses resignation. She turns toward the few girls who still have room to choose, investing in them with the same fierce insistence that brought her onto the road in the first place.
Cutting Through Rocks stays with you. Not just because it documents struggle, but because it makes room for the fragile, necessary work of becoming a role model for women in a community where such examples are rare. It’s a reminder that even in the smallest communities, a single figure can hold open the path for others, just enough for them to imagine walking it themselves.
Stefanie Gordin is a writer, journalist, and co-founder of Rephrase Magazine.
