The Stoning has haunted Nowrasteh, an American with Iranian parents, for many years.

Ordeal: The stoning sequence took six days to film and took its toll on both cast and crew I’ve heard reports about bootleg copies and a woman wrote to me and said everyone was talking about it when she went to the hairdressers.’ ‘Though I think some Iranians have seen it and people are definitely discussing it. ‘They condemned it and then banned it,’ Nowrasteh shrugs. The Stoning is set in Iran and, needless to say, the Iranian authorities are not impressed. He seems an unlikely candidate to direct a film that some critics consider a rather sophisticated form of torture porn. In person, Nowrasteh is immaculately dressed, gently-spoken and mild-mannered. ‘They want to know what happens at the end.’ Later director Cyrus Nowrasteh tells me that there are always walkouts. On the night I saw The Stoning of Soraya M, some simply could not watch. It is the gut-wrenching finale to a deeply shocking film. There is a roar of fury and the crowd close in. Now, tentative, her husband bends to examine her face. Over an excruciating seven-and-a-half minutes, she has been disowned by her family, buried to her waist in a hole at the centre of the village square and finally reduced to tattered rags of flesh by a baying mob hurling stones. She is drenched in blood and crumpled on the ground, mutilated face partially obscured by a mass of dark hair.

Stoning of soraya