Interview By David D'Arcy

It's been said by Condoleezza Rice that George W. Bush reads five books for every book she reads. Like much of what she has said publicly in defense of her boss, this is hard to believe. But we do know that Bush does watch movies, and if one film can be gotten to him before his alleged 9 pm bedtime, it should be Offside, Jafar Panahi's clever drama about girl soccer fans in Iran who are caught and confined when they try to sneak into a match between Iran and Bahrain. He might learn something about a country that he and his friends would love to bomb - especially in the wake of the capture of 15 British soldiers in the Persian Gulf.

The film is about many things, but one of its subjects is the imposition of strict rules - to protect women, the government says - which have turned back the clock under the Islamic regime in Tehran. One of those rules is that only men can attend soccer matches in Tehran's stadiums. Panahi follows a girl in disguise as she rides with loud male fans to a match. When she's found out, the camera moves to a pen outside an entrance to the stadium where a group of girls who are arrested are then kept in one of the stadium's outer halls that's been created as an impromptu jail. Confined, and guarded by a hapless conscript, a farm boy from Iran's Turkish-speaking Azeri minority, the girls are given a forum to do what the government does not want them to do. They argue openly with their jailer about the validity of laws that keep then out of the game. (Remember, freedom of speech and assembly are other taboos.) The men they confront are no match for their oratory, or for their knowledge of soccer. For the girls, sneaking into the stadium is a game in itself. (The one who wins is a boyish string-bean of a girl who manages to find an army uniform, which gets her into a VIP section until she's caught.) Competing to fool the guards heightens their mockery of the laws that are meant to keep them down. So much for reverence.

The film, compared to prison movies by some, seems more like a dialogue out of Diderot or a situation from a play in the theater of the absurd, in which characters use an improbable situation as a pretext for a conversation to explain the very stupidity of it all. One of the many paradoxes in Offside is that the girls are prevented by law from cheering for Iran with their male compatriots. The soldier explains that it's for their own benefit - they won't have to hear male fans cursing. When one girl mentions that Japanese women were allowed to attend a match between Iran and Japan, the soldier says it was permitted only because the Japanese women wouldn't understand the curses. Sounds like the kind of empty official rhetoric that you hear in any theocracy.

Panahi here is working as always with non-professional actors. He's also working in a context that will be familiar to Iranians, a soccer match, but it's a context that most foreigners won't know, especially if all they read is political news. (In his earlier film, The Circle, the characters, all women, are street prostitutes and young women thrown out of their homes for shaming their families; in Crimson Gold, the protagonist is a frustrated deliverer of pizzas, a servant of the modern take-out society.) Panahi is showing us contemporary Iran. It's clear that his characters here are suffering under an unjust regime, and that their suffering isn't limited to exclusion from soccer games.

When The White Balloon appeared in 1995 with its sweet tale of a young girl besieged by people out to steal the money her mother has given her to buy a goldfish, Bingham Ray (then at October Films, which released the picture in the US) had the ideal line for the trailer and the poster (and the voice to deliver it in fluent trailer-ese): "From a country you hate, a movie you'll love." And this time Panahi has added humor to the tenderness and poignancy of his earlier films. Just imagine a girl, still disguised as a boy, guided by a soldier into men's toilets - there aren't any for women - after she ties a poster of a soccer star over her face. Yes, dictatorships can be absurd, even laughably so. Panahi makes sure that we know there's a lot more to the joke.

I spoke to Panahi about football and phallocracy...

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Is football something that unites Iranians who might otherwise differ on politics and ideology?

There was a period, up until a few years ago, where whenever there was a soccer match, people would just take to the streets, and there would be two types of reactions. If the Iranian team lost, people would be very upset, and they would accuse the government of not letting the team win, as if they told the team that it had to lose the game. If they won, people would be happy and they would make demonstrations in the streets. There was always a reaction, whether it was a loss or a win. But this was four years ago. There was no chance for crowd control in those situations. You had people just spilling out of their houses in huge demonstrations all over the town. Not just in Tehran, but all over the country. It was almost like a forum for people to voice themselves in the absence of more legitimate forums, democratic forums. So this was the way that people reacted after soccer games. No other type of event can provoke such a reaction. This is how soccer unites people.

There's a lot of humor in how that happens. Did you intend the film to be a comedy?

I did not have enough control over the film to deliberately make it a comedy. It's just the circumstances regarding the issue that turned it into a comedy. The subject matter itself is so inherently funny, and it's so stupid at the same time. As you see in the film, the girls approach the subject with logic, and there's no response to their complaints. It's really the subject matter that has the humor in it. It's a sort of situation comedy that happens by itself, and we really didn't force it.

You've referred to the practice of having different rules for men and women, with prohibitions on a wide range of behavior by women, as gender apartheid. What do you mean by that?

In Iran, there's is a constant effort to segregate the sexes - in politics, in social circles, in all interaction between the sexes. To give you an example, on the metro and the buses, women and men have separate seats. Now there's talk of separating the sexes in elementary school. Legally speaking, there's injustice in inheritance laws. If a woman wants to leave the country for vacation, for example, she has to pay for the vacation of her husband. In court, the testimony of two women is worth that of one man. So when you look at all these issues, a picture of gender apartheid begins to emerge.

Offside is a film about rules. All rules in sports are arbitrary. A sport is a fiction of arbitrary rules that enables you to measure one team's performance against another's. Are you trying to draw a parallel between the arbitrariness of the rules of soccer and the arbitrary rules that keep women in a secondary position in Iran?

The arbitrary rules that have come over time to be the rules of soccer - we appreciate them because they contribute to the beauty of the game. Laws concerning human beings have been tested over time. Those that make sense have survived and contributed to the well-being of humankind. Those that did not make sense have been left by the wayside. But in Iran they don't allow the laws to be tested, because the only consideration is that laws have a religious pedigree. These laws don't serve the interests of Iranian women, and that's why they keep protesting them and they go to the stadium to defy the laws.

A few weeks ago, there was a peaceful demonstration of Iranian women, an advocacy demonstration. But they were beat up and arrested and the demonstration wasn't tolerated. As to the parallel you draw between soccer and real life, when there was a friendly game between Iran and Costa Rica, a group of Iranian women went to the stadium and were chanting, "We don't want to be offside." That was the protest that demanded that they be treated as equals under the law, and stated that they were being treated unjustly.

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In a film that's full of paradoxes, one of them comes when a solider who's guarding the women takes one of them to the toilet, the men's toilet, after tying a poster of the Iranian soccer star Ali Karimi over her face. He doesn't want her to be able to read the graffiti on the walls of the toilet, or to hear what the male soccer fans are saying, but after the match, when people are celebrating, women are permitted to mix with men on the street and to read the same graffiti on the street, and men are going to be yelling the same things after a match.

There are paradoxes, because the government has not been able to achieve a complete separation of the sexes across Iranian society. They have said that women are not allowed to go into the sports stadiums because they shouldn't be exposed to half-naked bodies of men, but at the same time, Iranian television, which is government-controlled - I should emphasize that all media is government-controlled - is showing soccer games every night on television. These are not only Iranian games but also games from European countries. The same women can see the same half-naked men up close and in slow motion sometimes on television.

A question about your process. These are non-professionals, and I assume part of your responsibility is to make sure they act well. How much rehearsing do you do, and what sort of problems do you face if you can't rehearse in the same place where you'll be shooting?

We don't do any rehearsals at all, because when you rehearse with an actor, he or she starts to use the actors' demonstration of feelings that takes away from his or her spontaneity and creativity. When we shoot, we always pray that we can get everything in the first take, because we believe the first take offers you the best an actor has to offer, and that's especially the case with a non-actor. The kind of rehearsal you referred to might take place when I'm going through pre-production, and I'm in the process of thinking of what kind of characters, what kind of types I need. Then I just look for the right person to cast, and cast them according to the mental images I have.

When we start working, sometimes I make some shots that are not related to the movie, but I want them to feel comfortable with appearing in front of the camera, and to make them accustomed to the presence of the camera and other filmmaking devices. The main thing for me is to adjust everything else to the type of character that they have and to try to find the right behavior and the right approach as I'm dealing with the cast.

The bans on women going to soccer matches and participating in all sorts of activities draw their basis from religion, or at least the government says the prohibitions do. Yet there are no religious figures and mention of religion anywhere in the film. Why not?

In none of my movies is there any direct reference to what is causing the situation that you see. I never point to the economics, culture, geography or politics. I don't think it's my function as a filmmaker to analyze the situation. I see it as my job to only show the situation, and to present the problems. It's up to the viewer to do their own analysis, and if you want to attribute anything you see in the movie to anything else that's causing it, [people can] make their own interpretation.

I'm not using this approach only because of the censorship. I do it because I don't like the filmmaking in which the filmmaker editorializes everything for the audience and leads them through the narrow pathway and tells them how to see the situation and imposes his thoughts on them. I would like to leave the audience alone to make their own interpretation. Otherwise, I think my movies would become too superficial and one-dimensional. That's the kind of approach you see in commercial movies, when they don't invite their audience to think about the issues. I'm not too crazy about that kind of filmmaking.

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The film seems to be an expansion or broadening of cinematic language, because you're using the documentary format, a documentary vessel, within which you have a fictional story. We're not really talking about a documentary compilation or compression of facts.

I'm really not concerned with expanding the cinematic language. I always refer back to my own sensibilities. I go with the story, and I try to get a good feeling for the story and the thematic elements of that story. And then the story of the format comes later. When I have the story in place, then the question is "What format can best bring the story to life, can best realize it?"

For this movie, the reason I chose the format and the style of cinematography was because I felt we needed to act as observers. That was the only way we could have credibility for the audience, for them to see us also as observers. And that's why you basically see two environments within the film. There's the stadium, the place where men go, and then there's that little pen, where the girls are held when they're arrested. We knew that these are two separate worlds. We didn't allow ourselves to go into those spaces and violate either of those two spaces. That's why our camera always stays out. That's why you don't see the game, because we didn't want to go into the stadium. That was the place for the men. We dealt with the cage in the same way. The camera never gets inside.

That's why we never show you the game. It would have been very easy for us. But we stay away from that kind of approach because it's a violation of the rules that we have already set for ourselves.

You've set up a paradox. You have coverage of the body that's mandated by law. Yet these women, these girls, in order to assert their own independence, to try to attend the match that they're banned from watching, are also covering themselves, not to bear the stigma of being women in this society, but to disguise themselves to partake of an activity that's reserved for men. You see a woman among those arrested who's wearing a chador, which suggests that even submitting to the rules of the regime doesn't get you anywhere.

The limitations affect everyone. It doesn't matter if you're a devoutly religious person or if you're the liberal type.

Outside Iran, people from all sorts of vantage points are looking at the country, often in a negative way. Is there any way that you think the film might be able to change those perceptions?

You have to make a distinction between the Iranian regime and the Iranian people. It is a reality that Iran right now is ruled by a government that has imposed its rules and regulations on people, and the majority of people may not like those rules and regulations. In my movie, you see those girls who really want to express themselves, who want to have freedom to express themselves. They also give the same opportunity to the soldier who is their guard. They're all in a sense victims of that system, so that's why they can empathize with each other. The guard and the captives can be like brothers and sisters.