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“We Were the First Audience for Our Editing Work”: Editors Sara Khaki & Mohammadreza Eyni on Cutting Through Rocks

An Iranian woman teaches a younger girl how to ride a motorcycle.Still from Cutting Through Rocks. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

In Cutting Through Rocks, directors Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki follow Iranian councilwoman Sarah Shahverdi, who teaches girls to ride motorcycles and uses her position to try to end child marriages. Cutting Through Rocks screens as part of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition.

Eyni and Khaki, besides directing, also served as the film’s editors. Below, they explain their method for editing in parallel and how they combed through 200 hours of footage.

See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here.

Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?

Khaki & Eyni: We worked as editors on various other projects in the past, so when it came to this project, it made sense for us to edit it ourselves. We had a clear idea of the 200 hours of footage captured in the field and we knew what we wanted to focus on.

Of course we welcomed a number of consulting editors, who each offered a different perspective to ensure an inclusive and diverse editing experience. It was mostly those who have filmmaking experience who gave us the most fruitful comments along the way.

Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were your goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?

Khaki & Eyni: Generally speaking, we had a vision for the film, where we knew what should happen at each point in the film and in the timeline of the film. But the editing process took a long time as it required us to sit with the footage and shape it in the way that would help the story narrative. Especially when it came to structuring the edited scenes to the movie it is now, it took us many versions to get there.

Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?

Khaki & Eyni: As the two of us were the editors of the film, we were the first audience for our editing work, and here is how it worked for us day in and day out with lots of discipline: We would have two editing suites set up; we each would designate a separate scene to work on daily; by the end of the day we would screen what we did to get the other’s feedback. The feedback helped sharpen the scene. Sometimes if one is out of ideas on how to make the scene any better, we would switch to give it another chance. Through working tirelessly on each scene and not giving up, even if they were challenging to edit, we were able to include various layers of the story into the edit.

Also, when it came to structuring edited scenes together, we had various screenings and feedback, which helped. Most importantly it was through many weeks of testing various many structural decisions to get to this point.

Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?

Khaki & Eyni: We used Premiere Pro, as it’s user friendly.

Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?

Khaki & Eyni: Each scene presented its own unique challenges to edit and each one has its own story.

Filmmaker: Finally, now that the process is over, what new meanings has the film taken on for you? What did you discover in the footage that you might not have seen initially, and how does your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding that you began with?

Khaki & Eyni: As editors we have the power of telling the story in a way that is indescribable. When seeing the raw footage for the first time versus when seeing it after the fact.

As editors, we massage the material and the raw footage for it to serve the story and say exactly the way it is to help the storytelling narrative. Sometimes, when seeing raw footage captured from the field contains too much information, not all of it serves the story. In the meantime, because of the vérité documentary nature of the footage, it becomes challenging how and what to edit. But in retrospect when looking at the footage, it’s incredible to see how we got here!

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