The Stoning of Soraya M.

I saw the trailer for this movie awhile ago and it's apparently showing now in limited theatres. I saw that Jim Caviezel starred with the always amazing Academy Award nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo (you'll recognize her when you see her), but had no idea that the producer, Stephen McEveety, is a devout Catholic who has also been involved with the movies Braveheart, We Were Soldiers, The Passion of the Christ, and Bella. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee's Catholic Herald has an article here.

The film, based on the book of the same name and inspired by events that took place in 1986 during the reign of Ayatollah Khomenini, tells the story of Soraya, a woman who lived with a womanizing, abusive husband for 20 years.

In his quest to leave her for a 14-year-old girl, the husband turns her two sons against her and ignores his daughters as if they do not exist. When she refuses to divorce him, he falsely accuses her of adultery. She is tried and convicted. The villagers in the small Iranian town bind her arms and legs, bury her up to her waist and bombard her with rocks for hours until she bleeds to death.

Only her aunt, Zahra, is brave enough to stand up for her and speaks out against this atrocity. She unexpectedly meets up with a passing journalist played by Jim Caviezel (“The Passion of the Christ”) when he stops in the village to get his car repaired.

After weaving him through the story, which he puts on tape, she unravels the political components that combined to make this tragedy happen the day before he arrived.

What McEveety really wants to do with this film is have it "serve as a mirror for victimizers, who regularly abuse women or children all over the world,” he said. “I think that certainly someone in an abusive relationship will take one thing from the film that no one else would take – especially about the role of victims, particularly women as victims. For some reason, this movie gives them some kind of meaning to their experience.”