Five young Iranian women with a passion for the country’s soccer program desperately need backing from military-minded authority figures to avoid retribution, all against the backdrop of a World Cup qualifier.
It sounds a lot like what President Donald Trump just did in pressuring the Australian prime minister to grant asylum for five members of Iran’s women’s World Cup team. But it also is pretty much the logline for Offside, Jafar Panahi’s soccer-themed Farsi-language classic that debuted at Berlin 20 years ago last month and that set the stage for his current powerhouse It Was Just an Accident.
Given that his taste in movies runs different from Berlinale favorites, Trump is unlikely to have seen the one-time Silver Bear winner. But Offside nonetheless provides a curious foretelling to what has played out in real time this week.
In Panahi’s dissident gem, five young women defy Iran’s ban on women attending sporting events by dressing as men and trying to sneak into Tehran’s Azadi Stadium for an Iran-Bahrain World Cup qualifying match in 2005. Their effort is largely thwarted as they’re held by military figures in a pen on an outdoor concourse during the game instead, awaiting arrest. (Panahi largely shot the film, without state permission, at the same game.)
Throughout the movie, as they quietly protest they should be allowed in, the women are demonized by the military figures holding them. “Get in, stop making trouble,” one officer says as the women are unjustly ushered into a holding pen before they’re to be arrested and remanded to the vice squad. “Stop clowning around” and “keep your heads down” a chief says as they’re ushered onto a minibus for arrest for the mere crime of attending a football match.
These comments were just eerily mirrored by remarks on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, where after the five young women refused last week to sing the national anthem in an Asia Cup WC qualifying game in Australia, a state-media anchor said that “Anyone who takes a step against the country under war conditions must be dealt with more severely.” The anchor, Mohammad Reza Shahbazi, also called the women “wartime traitors.”
Meanwhile, after the game last week, the players were ushered through back doors to avoid potential targeting from Iranian authorities, an image that contains a few parallels with the heroines of Panahi’s movie attempting to sneak into the stadium and blend in to avoid targeting from Iranian authorities.
Maybe most important, Offside raises questions about the effect of draconian and outmoded government restrictions on young women who want to exercise the most basic right of civic expression.
As, it turns out, so did Trump.
“Australia is making a terrible humanitarian mistake by allowing the Iran National Woman’s Soccer team to be forced back to Iran, where they will most likely be killed,” he wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “Don’t do it, Mr. Prime Minister, give ASYLUM. The U.S. will take them if you won’t,” Trump said, addressing Australian leader Anthony Albanese. The Sunburnt Country would wind up giving the five players asylum, in a move that may or may not have already been underway by that government but also was almost certainly accelerated by the Trump comments.
Ever since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has been experiencing a tension between free expression and state media in public realms like art and sports, which are tightly overseen by the regime. Only pro-mullah “state projects,” for instance, are sanctioned by the government while those making other kinds of movies can be stopped, jailed or worse.
Panahi has been both a keen observer and fearless documenter of this tension, beginning with his third narrative feature, the 2000 feminist regime-critique The Circle, and reaching a new pinnacle with Offside a half-decade later. (He had previously directed two less political movies, including the Camera d’Or-winning The White Balloon in 1995.) Offside made The Hollywood Reporter’s recent list of the best sports movies of all time at No. 14 (“may be one of the best films ever about fan passion and how love of the game can triumph over everything…even the repressions of patriarchy”). The Sony Classic release also ranked this past summer on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century, ahead of The Hurt Locker and Winter’s Bone.
That Offside should anticipate current realities, then, is hardly a surprise. Still, the idea of so many of these themes now unfolding in the headlines will be striking to anyone familiar with Panahi’s work, and is perhaps just one more piece of evidence for his dominance of the foreign-language film conversation this Oscar season. Accident, which is about another means of confronting the regime, has been a contender in both the screenplay and international categories for this Sunday’s Oscars and could get a boost from current events. (He has been promoting his vision for art in Iran on platforms like The Daily Show.) The film is most predictive in showing the soccer patriotism of the young women even in the face of impending state punishment — a steadfast love for the very country that is treating them harshly. That same vibe is reflected by current protesters and freedom fighters, who embrace an ideal of Iran even as its reality continues to punish them.
Built under the Shah, Azadi Stadium was originally called Aryamehr before being renamed by the regime after the Revolution, and the film gives a larger vibe of what has been lost since 1979. The women on the concourse in Offside are surreally forced to rely on secondhand reports of the game much like many Iranians themselves have become strangely disconnected from the very place they occupy, hearing reports of something that was once theirs and yet feels so far away.
While at the end of Offside the team is triumphant and the women happy — “the soldier has to dance!”, an excited fan says boarding the arrest bus and getting everyone into the giant street party in Tehran — the young women are never actually formally allowed to enter the stands to watch the game, and for all its momentary joy the movie ends under an uncertain cloud about what they may ultimately might endure in their homeland. In that sense, too, the movie echoes reality — Trump and Albanese, like the film’s liberating fan, giving the real-life soccer women a temporary respite even as they and their family’s longer-term future in Iran looks far from bright.
