Offside

Offside is a ninety-nine minute trip to the world of football, during which the audience won’t see a ball or players for even a split second. Offside actually is a film about the role football can play in the lives of women in Iran who are forbidden by law to attend public football matches. If they really want to watch football, they have to watch it on TV. The story of the film shows how inventive these women can get and how restricted their lives are.
We follow several characters who in one way or another manage to sneak into the football stadium wearing boys’ clothes or even wearing a uniform, but all end up fenced in behind the stadium walls. A group of soldiers guard them. Even though the young women are unable to watch the match with their own eyes, they can follow the sounds coming out of the stadium, which makes them terribly happy. The match is a very important one: it is a qualifying match for the 2006 World Cup. Iran wins. The young women are supposed to be punished for their daring attitude.
The film is shot in a documentary-like style and uses, as is often the case in Iranian films, non-professionals as actors. The director’s intention was to evoke the positive confusion of the audience where they cannot tell truth from fiction any more. The places are real, the event is real, and so are the characters and the extras. (LC)