“Cutting Through Rocks,” a documentary by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, is a deeply frustrating movie. Did our filmmakers intend it as such when they began filming in 2017? Ms. Khaki and Mr. Eyni had to know that crafting a meditation on women’s empowerment in a remote byway of rural Iran was going to be a challenging endeavor. Their movie portends otherwise — at least initially.

“Cutting Through Rocks” takes place at an unnamed village in a region from which Mr. Eyni hails. It’s a dusty locale marked by rubble-strewn thoroughfares and basic niceties Westerners have long taken for granted. Ms. Khaki was born in Tehran and immigrated to the United States, where she pursued studies in filmmaking at Baltimore and New York City. “As an immigrant in the U.S.,” she writes, “I realized gender equity is an unfinished work globally.”

Ms. Khaki and Mr. Eyni have made the kind of documentary a friend dubs, with tongue in cheek but to serious purpose, a “God Bless America movie.” Among those village niceties? The ability for women to create rewarding and independent lives free of governmental and cultural suppression. “Cutting Through Rocks” should be required viewing for Ivy Leaguers for whom the American patriarchy is a pernicious and persistent bugaboo. As the travails of Sara Shahverdi prove, these privileged tutees don’t have the foggiest.

Ms. Shahverdi is at the center of “Cutting Through Rocks,” and she is a force of nature. Close to 40, she has worked as a midwife delivering hundreds of babies, and has long since divorced her husband from an arranged marriage. A nonconformist through-and-through, Ms. Shahverdi credits her father with instilling an emboldened streak of independence. Dad has long been dead — Sara was a teenager when he passed away. A faded picture of father and daughter is a source of strength, particularly when Ms. Shahverdi has had a tough day.

The days become tougher when Ms. Shahverdi steps up to really buck the status quo. Forget the recalcitrant metal gate she’s trying to pry open when we first meet our heroine or, for that matter, the ire of her brothers when Ms. Shahverdi shreds a legal document that would have put their wives at a severe economic disadvantage. It’s when she puts her name in as a nominee for the village council that life gets difficult.

The men in the village pooh-pooh Ms. Shahverdi’s ambitions. The younger folk, ever amenable to a renegade spirit, are supportive. When the candidate asks an assembly of wives if they are happy with their lives not a single hand is raised. 

At a school for girls, she hears from the students about their worries at having a stymied education and living stymied lives. “My heart aches,” Ms. Shahverdi avers, “when I see an 11-year-old girl who already has two kids.” With the parents’ permission, she adopts a teenage divorcee as a means of mentoring a precocious young woman otherwise headed for a second marriage.

Ms. Shahverdi wins big in the election, and gets down to business. Through her initiative, gas lines are installed, construction begins on a public playground, and wives sign on to become co-owners of their family homes. Backs bristle, but who doesn’t want heat in their homes?

All the while, Ms. Shahverdi travels through town on a telltale motorcycle, encouraging her young female charges to come along for the ride. A scene in which Ms. Shahverdi and three young girls — each of whom masks herself to escape identification by the township — motor down the highway is among the most uplifting cinematic moments in recent memory.

How well does this stubborn, forthright, and forward-thinking woman succeed? Let’s say that the resistance she encounters is not unexpected, potentially barbaric, and, in the end, sobering. “Cutting Through Rocks” is, as the filmmakers intimate to heart-rending effect, an activity best approached in a deliberate and sustained manner.