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Audio Format: DD 2.0 Video Format: Widescreen 1.85:1 Languages: Farsi Subtitles: Korean Region Code: 3 Year Made: 2006 Running Time: 93
 An Iranian comedy about female football fans? An Iranian Bend It Like Beckham? It sounds pretty unlikely. (I can't really imagine Iranian arthouse master Abbas Kiarostami directing Juliet Stevenson doing her "There's-a-reason-Sporty-Spice-doesn't-have-a-boyfriend" speech, unless perhaps she were to do it unsmilingly and at a fraction of the normal speed, with the camera trained enigmatically on her deadpan face while someone else replies.) A football comedy is none the less what Iranian director Jafar Panahi has created with this likeable, gentle and charming film about young women football fanatics, disguised as boys, doing their darnedest to defy the all-male rule and get in to see the Iran v Bahrain qualifying international for the 2006 World Cup.
With audacity and flair, Panahi filmed it at the actual stadium, at the actual match, and appeared to have two improvised outcomes broadly in mind in case of victory or defeat - though Iran did in fact qualify and their first match, against Mexico, takes place this Sunday.
Comedian Omid Djalili had a routine about the reaction of the British Iranian community's reaction to Iran's sensational 2-1 victory over the United States in the 1998 World Cup final.
Well-heeled professionals and store-owners poured out on to the Edgware Road in west London, got in their cars and drove slightly faster and more happily than usual up and down, honking discreetly, waving flags modestly, smiling benignly: the best-behaved victory celebration in the history of football.
This is one of those very rare films that, with no very obvious and coercive narrative structure, simply goes with its own self-created flow, and never looks pointless or directionless. In recent years, I have fallen out of love with the obscurantist, miserablist tendency in Iranian cinema: the low point coming with Babak Payami's ineffably gloomy Silence Between Two Thoughts (2004). Yet other movies have shown an energy and freshness. One such is Kamal Tabrizi's comedy The Lizard (2005), and this is another such: approachable, accessible, yet with the delicacy and subtlety that characterises the best of Iranian movie-making. I liked it a lot better than Panahi's crime drama Crimson Gold (2003) and rank it as equal, in its unassuming way, to his excoriating drama The Circle (2001). It is a quietly intelligent and humorous alternative look at football, pop.
Special Features:
- Production Notes
- Director
- Trailer
- Photo Gallery
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