the stoning of soraya m

i saw a free screening of this movie at usc the other day. now i know i'm pretty dramatic so i use the word "intense" a lot...but THIS movie was really intense.

i don't mean intense like, omigosh look at that car crash or dude look at all the fire and bombs. it was mentally intense. the movie, based on a true story, is about this woman named soraya whose husband wants to divorce her. she doesn't want to because she doesn't want her kids to end up on the streets. so in the end, he concocts this false story about how she is having an affair with another man. he manages to convince the religious leaders of their town that this lie is actually true. he even gets the accused man to go along with his story.

after she is tried and found guilty of having an affair, she gets tied up and placed in a hole, buried up to her waist. and she is stoned.

the last 10 minutes of this movie are of her stoning. and the director doesn't hold back. it's 10 minutes of very uncomfortable moments. you can see the stoning from her point of view as rocks are thrown in her face and blood drips down her face. you can see the stoning from the men, including her father and sons, who are throwing the rocks at her and how fast the stones are going.

it was difficult for me to watch. it was very, very uncomfortable because you could see her pain and her helplessness.

there were so many thoughts that ran through my head: people shouldn't be able to get away with this, some people take their religion to an irrational extreme, women have no rights or freedoms (the movie was set in iran). these were just a couple of my thoughts.

then i started to wonder, i was so impacted by this movie because soraya's death was so graphic. but what about the types of execution the US does? just because a man dies by lethal injection doesn't make the way he died any less heinous than a stoning.

the US always turns the looking glass on other countries, other people, other religions and points fingers at what they are doing wrong. but in this country, there are so many problems: healthcare, the economy, homelessness...the US needs to stop looking around and just look into a mirror to see what it is doing wrong to its own people.