By Annette Basile & Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director Cyrus Nowrasteh, who helmed The Stoning Of Soraya M, The Young Messiah and Infidel.
Since the end of December last year, the nation of Iran has been ripped and torn by protests and brutal reprisals, as the Islamic Republic government murders those who demonstrate against it, and the world watches on in horror, with outside nations poised to act as thousands of innocent people die.
Iran is a nation with a history filled with violence, political upheaval, religious oppression and outside involvement. Iran has also produced a number of brilliant filmmakers – including the lauded likes of Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, and Asghar Farhadi – but most of them have had to create their art either in secrecy or outside of their home country in fear of persecution and imprisonment at the hands of the nation’s repressive Islamic Republic government.
And while the aforementioned directors have received garlands from film festivals and praise from critics around the world, there is another filmmaker who has also suffered – though in far less extreme circumstances – at the hands of Iran’s Islamic Republic government. Though not born in Iran, the parents of Cyrus Nowrasteh were, and his complex relationship with the homeland of his mother and father has informed his work in a deep and profound manner, also providing the thematic throughline that qualifies the decidedly under-celebrated director for Unsung Auteur status.
“If I went to Iran right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were arrested, detained, questioned or forced to leave…or any of the above,” Colorado-born writer/director Cyrus Nowrasteh told FilmInk way back in 2008, when things were actually far less incendiary than they are now in Iran. Nowrasteh would certainly no longer be able to enter the country of his parents’ birth, but his 2008 film, The Stoning Of Soraya M., which was banned and condemned in Iran, actually did find its way across the border. “There are thousands of bootleg DVDs of the film inside of Iran,” Nowrasteh explained in 2008. “They get together, with sometimes twenty people in somebody’s home, and watch it. This is all in defiance of the government ban. I think that’s great.”
Nowrasteh’s most discussed film is, without exaggeration, a masterpiece. It’s a tense, dark, almost fable-like story – but one based on true events. Its title tells you where things are heading, and the film is uncompromising in its depiction of the stoning of Soraya, an innocent Iranian woman who was convicted of the “crime” of adultery, and sentenced to death under Sharia law. Nowrasteh and his co-writer wife, Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh, were able to get hold of footage of real stonings, shot secretly on cell phones, and the director says that they felt a “responsibility not to sanitise it.”
The pivotal stoning scene took six days to shoot, and it uses a seamless mix of CGI and puppetry to recreate the horror, yet it was nevertheless gruelling on the cast and crew. “When you watch the real thing, it elicits in you shock and disgust, especially when you see that the whole group is cheering, and that it’s all men – it’s almost like a sporting event, and we show that in the movie.”
The director had not wanted to specify where the US production was shot, but it’s emerged that it was Jordan that substituted for Iran. Set in a timeless mountain village, everything about this film is magnificent – the performances hit hard, with spellbinding work from Mozhan Marnò as Soraya and Shohreh Aghdashloo (The House Of Sand & Fog) as her protective, gutsy aunt. The story itself – the scheming, lies and blackmail that lead up to Soraya’s inevitable fate – is as transfixing as it is tragic.
The events may be specific to Iran, but there’s a universality about the film – no country has a monopoly on injustice. Based on the 1994 book by French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam (played in the film by The Passion Of The Christ’s James Caviezel), it’s a heavy story that needed to be handled with extreme delicacy. “There was some discussion about, ‘Well, should we change the title? Does it give it away?’ I wanted to remain faithful to the title out of respect to the author, who passed away while we were filming,” Nowrasteh explained in 2008. “I also felt that there is an inherent tension that exists when you know what’s going to happen. Alfred Hitchcock made his name on creating tension through anticipatory dread.”
The film picked up The Los Angeles Film Festival audience award, and was well received by most Iranian-Americans – yet it had its detractors. The New York Times described it as blurring the line “between high-minded outrage and lurid torture-porn.”
“They really slammed us,” Nowrasteh told FilmInk. “They really came at us hard.” One of the Times’ complaints was about how men were portrayed – they described most of the film’s male characters as being shown as “fiendishly villainous.” But again, this was an unfair call. The men were painted in much darker tones in the source material, and the filmmaker actually fleshed them out and tried to humanise them. “Even with the despicable characters, we have to see that they have moments of doubt. If we don’t feel that, then this just becomes cardboard.”
Nowrasteh – who prior to The Stoning Of Soraya M. wrote the pilot episode of the popular TV series La Femme Nikita, and directed the Oliver Stone-produced telemovie The Day Reagan Was Shot – battled controversy over The Path To 9/11, a 2006 documentary mini-series that he wrote and produced…and received death threats over. It saw him labelled a right winger in progressive Hollywood due to its criticism of the Clinton administration’s “failed efforts to get Bin Laden” (Bill Clinton even succeeded in pressuring the backers, Disney, to cut three minutes from the series). Nowrasteh, however, described The Path To 9/11 as “an equal opportunity offender”, adding that the Bush administration wasn’t exactly thrilled about it either.
A vague association – based on promoting his mini-series – with influential ultra-conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh added to Nowrasteh being “pigeon-holed” as “a big conservative.” When asked to clarify his politics, the filmmaker politely refused, saying that a person’s political views “evolve” over time. But he added with a laugh that his “personal politics in terms of everyday life” are “pretty loose.” Those associated with The Path To 9/11 were intimidated by the controversy – “they ran for the tall grass” – but Nowrasteh defended it. “I was the only one who fought for it, and I became the focus of a lot of the controversy,” he explained. “It put me on the map for a lot of people. The Stoning Of Soraya M. would probably not have been made if it hadn’t been for The Path To 9/11.”
And indeed the quiet power of The Stoning Of Soraya M. in turn saw Nowrasteh get a number of films greenlit in its wake. The director (who made his debut with Veiled Threat, a 1989 independent film based on the real-life murder of an Iranian journalist living in Orange County) followed up his controversial 2008 true-life drama with something far different. Based on the book by famed horror scribe Anne Rice, 2016’s The Young Messiah followed the life of Jesus Christ as a child, and resounded again with Nowrasteh’s poetic brand of storytelling.
“It’s a beautiful story,” Nowrasteh told America Magazine. “I read the book and thought it was about as fresh and original a take on the Jesus story as I’d ever read. For me, it’s all about the story, it’s all about the narrative…it’s all about a sense of wonder through the eyes of this very special child. The whole heritage of biblical movies had never touched upon Jesus as a child.”
After The Young Messiah, Nowrasteh returned to the contemporary setting of The Stoning Of Soraya M., but retained his new faith-based approach to filmmaking with his 2019 drama thriller Infidel. Directors who make faith-based films are pretty much instantly dismissed in critical circles, but Cyrus Nowrasteh’s filmmaking abilities are undeniable, and he certainly knows how to ratchet up the tension.
This powerful drama (which is drawn from several true-life accounts but is largely fictional) follows a Christian man (Jim Caviezel) kidnapped and imprisoned in Iran for his religious beliefs. Filled with surprising moments, the film details a Christian underground inside Iran, led primarily by women, who work together with Muslims also in opposition to the Iranian regime.
Though he diverted with 2025’s family-themed Sarah’s Oil, Cyrus Nowrasteh is a truly focused filmmaker always with an eye on topical subject matter (his next film is Dark Horse, a biopic on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, again with Jim Caviezel), and particularly on the injustices of his parents’ homeland of Iran. And for the haunting horrors of The Stoning Of Soraya M. alone, he certainly deserves the mantle of Unsung Auteur…
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Morgan Matthews, Tom Laughlin, Diane Keaton, Ed Hunt, Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
