Last night I watched a movie I stumbled on by accident: Jafar Panahi’s Offside. It’s a funny yet biting commentary on the political situation in Iran today. It was shot on location in Iran during World Cup soccer finals. The story involves a number of young women trying to sneak in to see the game despite the fact that it’s illegal for women to attend games with men. Throughout the course of the film we, like the women, never get to see the soccer match because they’ve been captured and held in a crude cage by the military. Interestingly, none of the characters (the young women, or the young male soldiers holding them) is ever given a name in the story, so they represent more the idea of young people in Iran rather than specific Iranians.
The film is entirely in Farsi, the native language in Iran. And, predictably, the theo-fascist regime in Iran banned the film, although I suspect bootleg copies of it are probably circulating throughout the country.
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Saw parts of that, don’t recall where. Sad and funny by turns.
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