Der Kreis

I have seen several Iranian films in the past few weeks thanks to a short season of the films screened in the UK by Channel 4 – a channel that can rise above the level of reality television when it puts its mind to it. Having seen them in a compact space of time, I had quickly gotten it in my head that many of those screened had come to international attention and various degrees of acclaim because they were "issue" films that looked at some aspect of Iranian life with at least a semi-critical eye. However none of them came close to the sort of anger with the system that was evident throughout this film.

The plot sees several stories that weave around one another to produce a film that looks at several women, all of whom are suffering in some way or other due to the general treatment of women in Iran. As a dramatic device it doesn't totally work because too little time is spent with each character to really get to know them or get into their stories and situations, but this struck me as being the film's second aim – with the first quite clearly being the injustice with which women are treated. As such, the narrative never really engaged me in terms of the people in the story, but the general picture painted was interesting enough to hold my attention and make me care for the characters generally, even if I would struggle to put names to faces.

The actresses are all pretty good and most come off pretty natural and convincing, with only the odd moment here and there not really working. They all strike a rather tragic note with each of them trying to make out the best they can in life but really oppressed in so many ways – whether it is small things like not easily moving in the streets by themselves or being rejected by their families to save honour. The direction is good, with different styles used for some of the characters – but done in a subtle way to the point where I didn't notice until somebody pointed it out to me.

Overall this is a good film but not a brilliant one mainly because the narrative comes secondary to the criticism of the system. However it is worth seeing mainly because, without really ranting, it holds a lot of anger at the status of Iranian women and their treatment and the injustice within the system – it may not be balanced but it is interesting and engaging.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi's Golden Lion winner of 2000, "Dayereh", is a critical and extremely powerful film about women who suffer from the injustices of the laws of the Islamic Republic.

As an atheist I support no religions, and I do not think one is better or more respectful to human lives than any other. "Dayereh" is a film that is concerned with religion only as far as it is a film that takes place in Iran, a country where Islamic Law dominates or even rules over the secular law. I am not an expert on Iranian law, but I do hold "Dayereh" to be the TRUTH, not a propaganda fiction of no concern to reality. Therefore, I admire Iranian directors who constantly produce magnificent films although they have to battle against censorship and the strict rule of the Ayatollah. This perhaps forces filmmakers to adapt a more poetic film semiotics, perhaps only suggesting cruelty and injustice, not showing it directly like Western directors are allowed to do.

Like Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami before him, Jafar Panahi has succeeded in producing a small, but superb film. Kambuzia Partovi's script is great, linking the misfortune and fates of several young Iranian women together into a whole narrative. All four or five women (one is not as thoroughly described) have committed unlawful acts, but their crimes are not explicitly stated in the dialogue of the film. However, we understand that their crimes would not be considered near a crime in most other countries, because it is related to sex and female independence, not to real criminality. Bahram Badakshani's camera is always close to the women, and their acting is nothing less than brilliant. The tracking movement of the camera and the shots composed by a hand-held camera result in many long takes, where the actresses get to show their skill wihtout editing. This is also a marvellous success for the director Panahi.

This film also contains a subtle symbolic factor, namely the wish for several of the women to smoke a cigarette. Different interruptions and laws concerning females and cigarettes prevent the women to smoke until one of the last scenes, when a women is arrested for travelling alone in a car with a man to whom she is not married (prostitution?). When a male prisoner is lighting up his cigarette, the woman does the same, and this time no one stops her. The smoking of the cigarette is not a symbol of freedom, because all the young women end up back in prison, but the cigarette does create a symbol of escape, although it is an escape from society, and not from the persecution of women who act like human beings (in Iran, read men). The smoking becomes Virginia Woolf's room of their own, the escape from a society that does not want them to be free.

Devastating film that details the harsh treatment of women in Iran. The film begins with a hospital scene, where a family take the news of a new baby girl in the family so harshly that one would think the child had been stillborn. Following that the story introduces us to a group of women, one after the other, each of them recent convicts (in Iran a woman is put in jail indefinitely for riding in a car with a man she is not related to) who have their own struggles to overcome before they can seek asylum from the clausterphobic society that surrounds them. The film isn't as satisfying as it should be (even given its subject matter), and definitely deserves to be more engrossing. It is, however, an important human rights issue worth examining and for all it shows of a world as different from our North American society, it deserves a good look from us all.

While reading the various interviews with Jafar Panahi concerning his latest film "The Circle", I noticed that he always stresses the fact that his film is not a feminist film, but a humanist film. I'm reminded of the times I've been in a political conversation with someone and they've said "I'm no feminist but..." and then said something in defense of women's rights. Well, whether he intended it or not, Panahi has made a feminist film, because after all, feminism in its most basic form has nothing to do with hating men, but is merely a desire for the fair and equal treatment of women, and equal human rights is of course a cornerstone of humanism. I'm no scholar (and that I can say in all honesty) but yes, I would say I'm a feminist. I've never been on a march, and I've never read the works of any great feminist theorists, but to the core of my soul I believe in the equal and fair treatment of women, and if that doesn't make me a feminist I don't know what does.

Of course, all this discussion about feminism wouldn't matter if "The Circle" wasn't such a strong film. Panahi's film, almost universally praised, will receive no negative criticism here either. His use of narrative (most reviews compare the narrative style to "La Ronde" [1950], but I suppose comparisons could be made with "The Phantom of Liberty" [1974] and "Slacker" [1990], for that matter) might be perceived by some rob the characters of their individuality, but of course that is part of the point. In Iran today women are all grouped together, Panahi is saying, and they are seen as no more that a collective problem for men to deal with. Ultimately, there is nothing I can say about this film that hasn't been said before, but I wanted a chance to express my appreciation for this extraordinary myself.

After making two feature films and many short films on children, director Jafar Panahi makes a film The Circle where he deals with the condition of a wider gamut of the female gender (a girl child, a girl toddler left behind for adoption. a wide-eyed teenage girl, a pregnant mother whose spouse has been executed, a prostitute, the only wife of an expatriate doctor, the less-preferred first wife of a husband with two wives, a grandmother who wishes for a male grandchild, a possibly unmarried mother who can no longer support her girl child) in Iran.

"The circle" begins and ends with a name of a woman--Solmaz Gholami--being called out through a door hatch. Interestingly, the film never introduces us to this character. It is apparently the name of a woman who has given birth to a girl child. The film introduces us to the grandmother of the child who is informed by the nurse that the newborn is a girl. The hatch belongs to a white door of an operation theater in a hospital.

The film ends with the same name being called out from a similar hatch of another door—this time a prison door of a room that holds most of the female adult characters in the film rounded up for varied offenses. Implicitly the film states that women face discrimination from birth until death in Iran. Evidently someone had stated a white lie earlier that the unseen Ms Gholami was to have a baby boy after an ultrasound test of the foetus. The revised information of the arrival of the girl child upsets the grandmother who wants a boy grandchild.

In between the opening of the two hatches, the roving hand-held camera underlines the state of an unusual group of women in Teheran, without IDs or male support evading police and eve-teasing males. The viewer is informed that most of the women (except the grandmother and two children) have either been paroled from prison or have escaped prison and are therefore on the run from the cops. Their original crimes are never stated. One woman is picked up by the police while she is making a call from a public phone booth. Once imprisoned, the women are afraid of the blot in their lives to the extent that they hide it from their husbands! Were they imprisoned for sexual offenses? None of the women seem to be politically active. However, the film underlines one fact—-had they either a husband or a father, or even a student ID, they would have no problem. Some of these women who want to smoke a cigarette. They can only do so when the men (in the film, a policeman) are smoking in public!

Mr Panahi is able to present interesting aspects of intra-female bonding in Iran. Some women travel the extra mile to help other women in distress. Even a prostitute helps another woman to escape the police. Then there are women who do not help others because they do not want their husbands to know that they were once behind bars. A mother leaves her girl child in the street in the hope that a stranger will provide a better life for her child. Yet they do not wallow in self pity. Who are these women with no husbands and having shady pasts? They are definitely not the typical Iranian woman.

Any woman or sensitive man could be seduced by the subject of the film. However, the film ought to be evaluated beyond the obvious feminist issues—-it is a study of individuals born into any society that deprives them of equal privileges. One of the reasons for my argument is that many men shown in the film are caring men who help women in trouble rather than become their exploiters. Some policemen shown are corrupt, but some are decent chaps. Many men in the film do respect women. There are also intolerant men who are ready to kill their sister who is pregnant without a husband. "The circle" cannot be a feminist film merely just because the female form covered in burkha/chador indicates repression. The film is more humanist than feminist—which the director has claimed in interviews. One tends to agree with Mr Panahi on this point.

However, it is a fact that to abort a child in Iran is a difficult proposition as it would be in most countries today. It would be difficult in most countries for any young girl without an ID to take a long distance bus ride all alone in the night. Iranian women enjoy more relative freedom than their counterparts in Saudi Arabia—where women cannot even drive a car! Panahi's women in "The Circle" seem to be women who were incarcerated for some "unknown" crimes—-never clearly elucidated in the film except in the case of the prostitute. If they were political prisoners, there is no clue except that a pregnant woman states that her spouse has been recently executed for a crime. There is a wide eyed girl who has never seen her village in recent years, who makes the viewer wonder why she was imprisoned in the first place. Panahi's film seduces the viewer, until you begin to wonder, if even the fact that the film was banned in Iran, is a viewer-seduction tool (almost all good Iranian films are banned in Iran, even though they have no sex or violence, but are possibly remotely critical of the present regime). The film was shot in Teheran and evidently the government did not have any problems at that time with the script. And then, bingo, it gets banned!

"The circle" is an interesting film that offers considerable fodder for thought. As cinema, it is without doubt an intelligent work and deserved the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival. Yet it is a film that calls for close evaluation by an astute mind rather than the heart of an impartial impressionable viewer.