Iran's Brave Leading Lady

by Lila Azam Zanganeh Info

Lila Azam Zanganeh has taught literature and cinema at Harvard University. She is a literary contributor to Le Monde and a host of other European and American publications. In 2006, she edited a collection of narrative essays on Iran. Her first book—Light of My Life, or How to Net the Incredible Happiness of an Extraordinary Writer—will be published in 2009.

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Steve Granitz, WireImage / Getty Images Actress Shohreh Aghdashloo has been nominated for an Oscar in America, but her name is blacklisted in Iran. She talks to Lila Zanganeh about growing up during the 1970s revolution, being smeared for playing a prostitute, leaving her native country, and re-emerging as an Academy Award contender. In her latest film The Stoning of Soraya M., Aghdashloo hopes to inspire a new generation of Muslim women to act and rebel against her country’s “mad race to the Dark Ages.”

“You are limited,” actress Shohreh Aghdashloo was told by an agent in Los Angeles, when she started out 20 years ago. “Well yes,” she replied in her deep, dark, velvet tones, “with an Iranian accent, jet-black hair and no experience in Hollywood, of course I am.” Yet somehow, in an industry known for typecasting mercilessly, Aghdashloo has carved a unique career for herself, taking on a wide array of unconventional roles. In the past 10 years alone, the comely Iranian actress has appeared in Hollywood productions such as X-Men: The Last Stand or The Lake House, television series (she played a terrorist in Fox’s 24), art films and Persian plays. Most notably, she was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for her role in The House of Sand and Fog, in 2003, opposite Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly.

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But her latest, and most harrowing, film is The Stoning of Soraya M., directed by the Iranian-born Cyrus Nowrasteh. Based on a book published in France in 1984 by a French-Iranian journalist (the screenplay is by Nowrasteh and his wife), The Stoning recounts the story of Soraya Manouchehri, executed for adultery in an Iranian village after being framed by her husband, who sought to marry an adolescent girl and rid himself of the mother of his six children. Aghdashloo portrays Soraya’s aunt, Zahra, the diffident feminine voice of the village, its lone crying conscience and the one witness who will tell the story to a chance journalist driving through the village. “Yesterday the Devil himself visited this town,” she whispers to him at the beginning of the film. And it is Aghdahsloo’s superb performance—supported by the very talented Iranian-American actress Mozhan Marnò—that lends texture and truth to this daunting film.

“But through everything they have endured, our women have become the unwitting heroines of a new Iran, which one day will turn around this mad race to the Dark Ages.”

For Aghdashloo, playing Zahra was at once an extraordinary and a horrific acting experience. The stoning scene, she explains, took six days to shoot in an Arab village (the country remains undisclosed for fear of negative publicity), and tens of villagers acted as extras and got to throw stones. The stones, by law, are small, so as to make the punishment for adultery last longer. On the set, a hole was dug in the middle of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by dilapidated clay houses overlooking a shady canyon. On the screen, one sees Soraya buried to her waist, her elbows tightened with ropes. The mob is restless, and stamps the ground furiously, fists in the air, clamoring for death. When the stoning begins, the air fills with dust, and a hail of cries.

“Day after day,” recalls Aghdashloo, “I watched the scene in horror, trying hard to define the line between cinema and reality. At night, I had this recurrent dream that I’d finished my work and needed to take a bath, but there was a dead infant floating in the tub... Dreadful as it was, the urge of getting the story out kept me going.” Mozhan Marnò, who portrays Soraya, notes for her part that only when she was in the ground herself, with her arms tied to her sides, did she come to understand one of the most barbaric aspects of stoning. “Since your arms are tied, or in some cases, since you are buried to your neck, you are deprived of your natural instinct to shield yourself, which is terrifying.”

When she first heard about the screenplay, in Los Angeles, Aghdashloo instantly remembered that she had seen on tape the actual stoning of two young Iranian men accused of homosexuality. The tape had been smuggled out of Iran in the early '90s. “I could not sleep or eat properly for days after watching this stoning being conducted by the local cleric and a young crowd.” So as soon as she heard about Nowrasteh’s project, Aghdashloo realized the film could convey a powerful humanitarian message on behalf of women and gay men in the Islamic world.