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Trailer for "Offside"

Really and truly, I don’t relish making arguments that are likely to fall on deaf ears, but I’m going to try anyway. Parents, instead of taking your young teens to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 this holiday weekend, why not take them to see the Iranian film Offside instead?

OK, I know that’s going to be a hard sell, but trust me, your kids will thank you. And even if they don’t, they’ll have gained some valuable insight into how sports-loving kids of their own age in another society are both the same as them and different from them.

Offside grew out of an experience that filmmaker Jafar Panahi had with his own daughter a few years ago. A big soccer fan, she was thrilled when the Iranian soccer team beat Australia and qualified for the World Cup. She wanted to go with her father to the stadium where tens of thousands of fans had gathered to greet the homecoming team. But Iranian law prohibits girls and women from entering sports venues where men are present. Panahi agreed to bring her along to try anyway, and even though she was barred at the gate, to his amused surprise she snuck her way in to join him.

The experience appealed as a basis for a movie to Panahi, who has an international reputation for such films as The White Balloon, Crimson Gold and The Circle. Using non-professional actors, Panahi developed a story about girls sneaking into the World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain at the stadium in Tehran. And working on the sly, with permits authorizing him to be making a different film, he shot the movie at the Tehran stadium during the actual game.

Offside opens on a bus taking a crowd of excited boys to the game. One of them is clearly not a boy, despite her efforts to disguise herself with face paint and a baseball cap. One of the kids points this out to a friend who tells him that it goes on all the time, picking out some of the better disguised girls in the area, and telling him to let it be—why shouldn’t they get to see the game, too?

At the stadium, soldiers arrest any girls they find and take them to a holding location on the upper tier, where they can hear but not see the game. Barely older than the girls they have to guard, these are not professional soldiers but rather young men doing their required military service. They would rather be watching the game themselves, and are hard pressed to explain why it’s against the law for girls to enter the stadium. (When one says it’s because men at sports events swear so much, his prisoner promises “We won’t listen!”)

In the movie’s most comical sequence, one of the girls has to use the bathroom—a problem given that the stadium, of course, has no facilities for women.

Like many Iranian filmmakers Panahi is adept at working with and writing for children. (Several of his films were written by the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, to whom the film’s opening scene is a brief homage.) While stories about children are easy to get past the Iranian censors that must approve films before they are made, they are also rich in possibilities for social criticism. Offside is a critique of the repression gripping a society in which a minority of the population imposes its stringent morality on everyone else: the fact that we never see what is obviously an exciting soccer match is a continual reminder of this frustration.

But it’s a fairly lighthearted, optimistic critique that makes such rules seem merely silly. Fans of Panahi’s earlier films may miss his usual dramatic outrage, but sometimes ridicule can be an equally strong tool. Offside’s final scenes provide a sense of optimism, suggesting that the real spirit of a people can’t be pressed down for very long.

Still need convincing? Well, Offside will certainly be less crowded than Pirates, which you can always see next weekend. And you might impress on your kids that at least they have a chance to see this movie—they couldn’t if they lived in Iran, where, like all of Panahi’s films, it has been banned from public exhibition.