From director Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon; The Circle, Crimson Gold) this documentary-style account of what it takes for a female to gain entry into the soccer stadium in Tehran tracks in near-real time the foiled efforts of several teenage girls to see a game live. By law, females are not allowed into the stadium in Iran.  Panahi demonstrates the pointlessness of rules that ban these fans, who love the game as much as any man, from attending the World Cup qualifying match against Bahrain.  

The film follows a small band of girls, unknown to each other, who try to gain entry to the game in various ways.  To add insult to injury, Bahrainian women, as foreign nationals, have been permitted while the local girls are not.  Panahi uses a cast of nonprofessional actors. His claustrophobic approach begins inside the car of a man as he cuts off and stops a bus loaded with soccer fans, and ends inside a police van full of innocent young offenders.  A bit weighed down by didactic dialogue, the subtext questions why the sought-after experience of seeing the game live at the stadium should be denied to females, and indeed questions the idea of rulemaking itself.  The shouting, cursing and letting loose, deemed inappropriate for females, is the lame excuse.  

The girlish face-paint, team T-shirts and soccer caps concealing their long hair are a thin disguise and most of the girls fool no one. One slips past the gate but she runs like a girl and it’s a dead giveaway. The small band is rounded up by the soldier-guards and taken to a holding area out of sight, but within earshot, of the game, just enough to tantalize.  This leaves the girls and their captors “offside,” a play on words reflected in the title.  Army service is mandatory in Iran.  The soldiers, close in age to the girls, are more like brothers and cousins than military enforcers.  As the afternoon wears on, the soldiers’ zeal for their duty wanes, as each would rather be somewhere else.   

Panahi’s impetus for making this film was an incident when his daughter was denied entrance to a stadium a few years ago.  More lighthearted and perhaps not as quietly compelling as the simple story of The White Balloon, the film makes its point.  As the game nears the end, the guards herd the girls onto a small van to be taken to the police station.  The growing euphoria over the game’s conclusion spills out onto the streets and further obscures the guards’ commitment to their duty, rendering the arrest rather pointless.  

Panahi was denied a license to shoot Offside because of his previous critical approach to the Iranian status quo, so he used a phony synopsis to get a permit. In this latest effort, he continues to refuse to submit his films for approval or to censor himself.