With the Super Bowl this weekend, leading up to the big game, This Weekend’s Film Festival delves into the world of obsessed fandom. A loser’s entire life revolves around the New York Giants. An Arsenal soccer fan has trouble balancing between his girlfriend and his team. A Red Sox fan makes all his life decisions around his team’s schedule. Female Iranian soccer fans risk prison to attend a World Cup qualifying game. Soccer hooligans beat rival team fans for the fun of it.
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Jafar Panahi has been fighting for the rights of women in his native Iran his whole career. Outside of bootleg DVDs, his work is not widely seen in his own country. But his work has been lauded at film festivals all over the globe. With this film, he took a much lighter touch on equal rights than his previous films like THE CIRCLE. In Iran, women are not allowed to attend male sporting events. His story follows women who dress up like boys to sneak into soccer matches to support their national team. Through this often-humorous tale, he exposes the hypocrisies and irrationality of it all.

In an existential move, none of the characters have names. The women are all types and as he shifts his focus from one to the other, they become a collective group that we root for instead of individuals, which is rare and hard to pull off in film. The first girl (Sima Mobarak-Shahi) rides a bus to the World Cup qualifier and a couple of the boys can tell that she’s a first timer. She not very convincing as a boy. When she gets to the stadium, she buys a ticket from a scalper (Mohsen Tanabandeh), who of course gouges her compared to the men he sells to. But the second she comes to security, she gets caught and is sent to a holding pen with other women.
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