Offside

"This is an especially relevant film now. Jafar Panahi is a major Iranian director, and he was imprisoned in Tehran in March, as a direct result of his filmmaking. Like a lot of his films, the idea is for the action to transpire in real time. So it starts with women who have disguised themselves as boys, and are trying to infiltrate the crowd at a World Cup qualifier. He managed to get permission from Iranian authorities to film at the stadium at an actual World Cup qualifying match, so it has a very realistic feel about it. Also, the actors he uses aren’t really actors – he tries to get real people to sneak into the stadium and then he films that. So they are rounded up by security authorities and penned in outside the arena at the match. The venue is Azadi Stadium in Tehran and it seats 100,000 or more, and you hear the crowd noise as they have this ongoing debate with their jailers, who are just doing their national service and really don’t care one way or another about Islamic law. One of the scenes in the film that I particularly remember is when one of the guards has to escort one of these women to the bathroom and, of course, there are no women’s rooms in the stadium because only men are allowed. So he has to get her into a men’s room and they have this long conversation. He’s a security officer and is just following orders, just doing his job, trying to satisfy his boss, and she ends up escaping from him in this sort of maze inside the stadium. It’s really an extraordinary film. No, the film has never been shown in Iran or in the cinemas there. But much of his work is available on pirated DVDs – that’s how people get to view it. No, he keeps that from authorities. He uses a ruse – I think he says he is filming the atmosphere at the match, without revealing his real purpose. As I recall, he had an approximately 30-day filming schedule, including the match where he gets a lot of the footage. But the authorities were chasing him and trying to catch up with him, so he had to film the last couple of days in a great hurry. But it’s very raw, the women ultimately gain their freedom and at the end he films them in the midst of a celebrating crowd in the streets of Tehran. It’s quite beautiful at the end."