Offside

To be shown: 17 March 2008
To be introduced by Ian Haydn Smith, freelance film critic

Iran 2006.
Director: Jafar Panahi.
Starring: Sima Mobarak-Shahi, Safdar Samandar, Shayesteh Irani.
Certificate PG. 93 minutes.

Synopsis

Tehran, 8th June 2005: the day of the World Cup qualifier between Iran and Bahrain. Iran only needs to draw to get to the finals. A father is looking for his daughter, whom he suspects of trying to smuggle herself into the game. Iranian women are banned from going to football matches because they're not allowed to see strange men with bare arms and legs.
Another girl is making her way to the stadium, inexpertly disguised as a boy but when she arrives she is apprehended and taken by a soldier to a holding pen along with five other girls, to await punishment for their immoral behaviour.
A ludicrous situation arises when a soldier has to accompany one of the girls to the men's lavatory (the stadium has no facilities for women, of course). He makes a mask for her from a poster of Iran's star player, Ali Karimi and, appalled that she might read the graffiti, makes her promise to cover her eyes. However, getting all the men out of the way doesn't prove as simple as the soldier had hoped and chaos ensues.
Offside is shot in a fluid, semi-documentary style and is located entirely outdoors or in moving vehicles, with no domestic interiors. This and the use of non-professional actors create a sense of spontaneity and authenticity.
Much of the film was shot on the day of the actual Iran-Bahrain match at Tehran's Azadi stadium, and Panahi knew that the ending of his movie depended on the outcome of the game. In fact, the match ended in triumph and the film concludes on a superficially optimistic note. Nevertheless, no-one will fail to register the film's darker side - these young women must go to practical and emotional extremes for the simple pleasure of attending a football match.
It is a striking feature of the film that the game remains unseen, glimpsed only for a few seconds in long shot as the girl is ushered to the lavatory or on a television set at the back of a shop.
Offside is comic and exuberant, bold and resilient but it is also acutely sensitive to the tensions simmering in a society where people, especially the young, are only too aware of the possibilities offered by other societies.

Notes

As with his previous films The Circle and Crimson Gold, Panahi once again ran into trouble with the censors for Offside and it is banned in Iran.
The chador, the ubiquitous emblem of female oppression, makes only one appearance in Offside, but under it the girl's face is painted in the colours of the Iranian flag.
The director asked each of the girls in the film to turn up with their own idea of how they would disguise themselves as a boy and what we see in the film was the girls' own attempts.
"One of the finest football films ever made - even though you don't see a single ball being kicked. Yet Jafar Panahi's sublime satire also provides a fascinating insight into juvenile attitudes to the Islamic constrictions imposed by the Iranian government." - David Parkinson, Empire Magazine.
The movie begins with a middle-aged man sitting in the back of a taxi talking to its unseen driver. This is an acknowledgement to Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's leading film-maker and Panahi's mentor. Several of his films take place almost entirely inside moving vehicles.
Director Jafar Panahi worked with a largely non-professional cast to bring to the screen this story inspired by his own daughter, who sneaked into a stadium to watch the Iranian soccer team train.
Offside was filmed on location in the Azadi Stadium, Tehran, on the day of the Iran-Bahrain game.
Jafar Panahi was nominated for the Golden Bear award for Offside at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival and won the Silver Bear Jury Grand Prix. Amongst those on the jury were Charlotte Rampling (UK) (head of jury), Marleen Gorris (Netherlands); Armin Mueller-Stahl (Germany).
The movie also won the Amnesty International Film Award for Best Film at the 2006 Ljubljana International Film Festival.
Iranian girls are permitted to play all-female football but when they compete against foreign teams with male coaches these men have to instruct their players from outside the ground by mobile phone.
Offside's upbeat conclusion has prompted accusations that Panahi has compromised the gritty realism of his earlier work but the symbolic implications of the film's title have not passed Iranians by: a woman at a Tehran demonstration for International Women's Day 2006 carried a banner with the words "We don't want to be offside".
Seven people died after the Japan game, another crucial World Cup qualifying match which took place in March 2005. The official version of events is that the spectators died in a stampede but other reports suggest that the police opened fire when crowds shouted slogans against the Islamic Republic.