Kicking up a fuss

Golnaz Farmani plays one of six girls trying to sneak into an Iranian soccer game in the Jafar Panahi film Offside. (Sony Pictures Classics)

Five years ago, when Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s daughter was 12, she asked the impossible: she wanted him to take her to a soccer game. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, strict rules have limited public interaction between men and women in Iran, and despite a national passion for soccer rivalling that of England or Italy, women are forbidden to attend matches. (President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a soccer fanatic, lifted the ban briefly last year, only to have it reinstated by the country’s spiritual leader and highest authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.)

Panahi warned his daughter that she wouldn’t be allowed into the stadium, but she insisted on going with him. As he predicted, the girl was refused entry. He sent her home and then went inside to watch the game. Ten minutes later, his daughter appeared beside him. When he asked how she got around security, she shrugged and said, “There’s always a way.” Panahi knew then that he had found the subject for his next film.

Offside was shot in Tehran in 2005, during Iran’s World Cup qualifying match against Bahrain. A group of bumbling young soldiers guard six girls, dressed as boys in baggy shirts and baseball caps, in a makeshift jail outside the stadium. Captured for trying to sneak into the game, the girls attempt to cajole, bully and charm the soldiers into letting them free long enough to watch the nail-biting match.

Though it’s a fictional story, the film is shot documentary-style, in real time, with the actual qualifying match as its backdrop. Starring an exuberant cast of non-professionals, Offside tackles the country’s social inequities with an absurd sense of humour; it’s a light-hearted departure from Panahi’s sombre earlier works. When one of the guards rationalizes the ban by saying, “There are lots of men in there. There will be cursing and swearing,” a girl shoots back, “We promise not to listen.”

“The humour is inherent in the situation,” says the 46-year-old Panahi, in town for the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “I don’t need to make it funnier. Every reason for the ban is not credible, every hurdle is not justifiable; therefore, it’s funny. It’s a bitter humour — it makes us laugh, but it hurts us.”

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. (Carlo Allegri/Getty Images)

Dressed in an immaculately pressed shirt and suit jacket, Panahi is hunched down in a chair in a charmless hotel suite. He is polite, but has the bored air of someone who’d rather be making films than submitting himself to a series of interviews. Speaking through an interpreter, he interrupts several times to clarify or elaborate on a point; he is sensitive to being misunderstood or misrepresented.

In Offside, he is careful not to portray the male guards as enemies of young women, but as victims of the system as well. “Obviously, in a country where women don’t have the same rights in regards to divorce, or custody, where their court testimonies are only worth half of a man’s, where they can’t go abroad without their husband’s permission, soccer is not the most pressing issue. But it is a way to get to those other issues. And we must never separate women’s issues from men’s. They are all related.”

Among the great Iranian directors, Panahi is not yet as well known as his friend and occasional collaborator Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry, winner of 1997 Palme d’Or at Cannes) or Mohsen Makhmalbaf, director of the stunning 2001 feature Kandahar, which starred Afghan-Canadian journalist Nelofer Pazira. But Panahi’s gimlet-eyed approach has made him one of the country’s most essential and controversial filmmakers. The White Balloon, his 1995 feature debut, which drew on neo-realist influences like Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, follows a little girl who sets out to buy a goldfish for the Persian New Year. The Circle (2000) explores the oppression of women in Iran. His last film, Crimson Gold (2003), about a pizza deliveryman turned jewel thief, has been described as “a Tehrani Taxi Driver.”

In keeping with his realist impulses, Panahi prefers to use non-actors in his films, a choice that has its complications. In Crimson Gold, the lead was played by real-life pizza deliveryman Hussein Emadeddin, a paranoid schizophrenic who nailed his angry, disenfranchised character, but also wreaked havoc on the set.

“My job as a filmmaker is to infuse credibility into those events I observed and make them believable for the audience, as well,” Panahi says. “If I use professional actors, when they play a role in my movies, the audience may have a memory of them in other films playing other parts and that might be a distraction. I feel I have enough self-confidence as a filmmaker to get a very good performance from anybody.”

Except for a few festival screenings, Panahi’s films have been banned in Iran, a situation that both frustrates him and fuels his work. Local fans have found his movies through black market DVDs and videos. “I’ve always done my best to bring my films to public screenings and make my films accessible to Iranian audiences. I’d love it if they could see my movies. I think the authorities are afraid of the impact my movies would have on the audiences if there was a general screening.”

A soldier (Mohammad Kheyrabadi, left) keeps girls (Ida Sadeghi, Shayesteh Irani, Mahnaz Zabihi, Golnaz Farmani and Sima Mobarak Shahi) from seeing a soccer match in Offside. (Sony Pictures Classics)

In the past, Panahi has had to smuggle prints of his films out of Iran for screenings at foreign film festivals. He was even denied a licence to make Offside, unless he reedited his previous work to official moral and political standards. He got around it by submitting a fake proposal under a pseudonym about a group of boys who want to attend a soccer match. Shooting covertly with a small crew, Panahi almost managed to finish Offside before the ruse was discovered. With just five days left in production, the police were ordered to arrest Panahi if they caught him filming. Luckily, he wrapped up the film without incident.

Panahi has faced down authorities outside of Iran, as well. In May 2001, during a stopover at New York’s JFK airport, he was detained after he refused on principle to be fingerprinted and photographed by U.S. immigration. (The U.S. State Department requires that Iranian citizens submit to extra security measures, even if they are just in the country for a few hours.) Airport security chained Panahi to a wooden bench for 10 hours. Ironically, at that very same time, The Circle was screening in New York to great acclaim. (Panahi’s travel troubles persist — he had planned to come to the U.S. in March to promote Offside, but was refused a visa.)

For all these difficulties, Panahi avers that his primary motivation is artistic, not political. “I make subtle movies, not polemics. On average, I only make films every two years. There’s a lot of thought that goes into my films and by the time I shoot, I’m really convinced of the idea. [So] I don’t think about how subtle the subject matter is, or how harsh it is, or whether it’s going to please anybody or not, or whether it shows the dark or light side of Iran, I just feel like it’s time to make the film. I’m not concerned at all about whether the average moviegoer will like the film, or whether the authorities will approve, or whether it’s going to be successful at film festivals. I just need to tell that story.”

Offside opens in Toronto on April 6.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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