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Offside (2005) Directed by: Jafar Panahi Date of birth: 11 July 1960, Mianeh, Iran Writing credits: Jafar Panahi & Shadmehr Rasteen Country: Iran Language: Farsi Color: Color Runtime: 90 min Released: 2005 Genre: Drama |
Saturday, February 18, 2006: (Berlin):
Director Jafar Panahi's Offside premiered at the Berlin film festival on Friday. The comedy uses soccer mania to highlight the struggle for women's rights in Iran. Panahi has used a cast of first-time actors to portray a group of girls who disguise themselves as boys to attend a World Cup qualifier at a Tehran stadium, which women are forbidden from entering.
OFFSIDE
Who is that strange-looking boy sitting in the corner of the bus in the midst of all the raucous football fans on the way to the stadium? If one were to look a little more closely, however, one can see that it is not a boy but a girl, dressed in boy’s garb. She is by no means the only female football supporter in Iran; in fact, there are an increasing number of women who are enthusiastic about the game.
Before the kick off, she is apprehended at a checkpoint and led away to an enclosure next to the stadium. She is one of many to whom the same fate has befallen and, at the enclosure, she meets a whole group of women – all dressed as men. After the game, they will be handed over to the vice squad.
But before that they are forced to endure torture! They have to listen to every roar of the crowd inside the stadium without being able to see the action on the field. Worse still, they are obliged to tolerate the nonsensical comments of one of the guards who clearly hasn’t the faintest idea about football. But the young women are determined not to give up. They’ll use every trick they know in order to get to see the game after all.
In his previous films, Jafar Panahi has often highlighted the social dilemmas to which modern Iranian women can be subjected. His current work is a knowing comedy describing one such predicament, and the violation of women’s rights that ensues.
Cast: Sima Mobarak Shahi, Safar Samandar, Shayesteh Irani, M. Kheyrabadi, Ida Sadeghi
The director is best known for The White Balloon and The Circle, the winner of the Venice Film Festival in 2000.
He said Offside aims to "bring to people's attention that a lot of people actually can't exercise their most fundamental rights".
However, he dodged a question about the impact of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new government on the atmosphere in Iran.
"I've always emphasised that I'm a socially minded filmmaker. I'm not a political filmmaker," Panahi told reporters.
He added that he hopes to have Offside screened in Iran before this summer's World Cup finals, but has yet to get permission. (Text from ndtvmovies.com)
Soccer, women's rights a winning combo in "Offside"
Fri Feb 17, 9:28 PM ET
Women's roles and the eternal fight to expand their rights in Iranian society get a light, hugely entertaining treatment in Jafar Panahi's "Offside," a story about girls caught dressing as boys to sneak into a World Cup-qualifying football match in Tehran.
In a film that's a far cry from the director's past festival winners, "The White Balloon" and "The Circle," Panahi builds small incidents into a bracing comedy that explores the ambiguity and inconsistencies of his country's laws controlling barriers between the sexes.
The film could get wide global exposure, as the themes are universal and the storytelling winning. Whether it ever gets released in Iran, though, is a real question.
Young girls trying to sneak past stadium check points for football matches -- soccer to us Yanks -- are so common that soldiers have created an upper-deck holding pen to put offenders before turning them over to the vice squad. Here the girls suffer in agony. Not, you understand, over shame or repercussions of their actions, but from hearing the crowd's roar. This only reminds them they are missing the crucial match.
They implore their equally young guards to take a peak at the game inside and perform a play-by-play of the action. The soldier in charge, a country bumpkin overwhelming by the sophistication of these Tehran women, resorts to shouting at everyone, including his own men.
(He tries to defend the country's ludicrous rules governing the sexes to one particularly cunning girl. After he's forced to admit the rules don't seem to apply to foreign women, she exclaims, "So my problem is I was born in Iran?"
High point is another girl's trip to the men's room -- there are no women's rooms -- under guard. This is a gem of comic action and cross-purposes. ( Reuters/Hollywood Reporter)
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