User Reviews

A baby girl is born, and the grandmother regrets for the sex of the baby. Three women are released under probation from the jail and get lost into the crowd, without courage to come back home and having no money. A woman escape from the jail to make an abort and is expelled from her own home by her family. Another woman left her daughter of about six years old alone on the street. A prostitute is arrested with her client in his car, and the man is released by the police later while the woman goes to jail. All of these individuals and disconnected situations are presented to show the repressive situation against the women in the Iranian society. In the end, like in a circle, all of them ends arrested in the jail. I am not aware of the behavior of the Iranian society with their women, but this movie portraits a horrible picture. The women are showed without freedom, depending on her husband or her family even for simple actions, like traveling in a bus. If their society works this way, how are these actresses daily treated after their performances in this movie? The camera and the direction are excellent. It is amazing the capability of the Iranian filmmakers in making simple but touching films. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): `O Círculo' (`The Circle')

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.

While Jafar Panahi's previous feature films dealt with children, with Dayereh he delves into the contentious issue of women's issues in a highly restrictive society, his native Iran. The film uses a narrative device that Tarantino might be proud to steal, with Panahi's camera following various women through their specific plights, often chasing them through the streets in handheld mode. At any moment, the camera may decide to follow a different character, and although the specific details of the various women's situations may differ, the oppression which is a part of their daily lives is consistently omnipresent. One feature of the film that is part and parcel of its roving camera approach is that there is very little in the way of exposition or denouement in any of the narrative threads. This however, seems to be the point of the entire exercise; in a society that treats women as a lower class of citizen, individual details and circumstances have no bearing on their ability to achieve anything without the presence or authority of a husband or father.

veryday occurrences such as the purchase of a bus ticket to the simple act of smoking a cigarette in public can (and does) result in mandatory incarceration for any woman at any time. The structure of the film gives the impression that literally any woman you might bump into on the streets of Tehran is caught in such a comprehensively prohibitive society that could lead to what could only be considered unconscionable drama in Western society.

Although there are no significant male characters in this story, Panahi uses the entire gender en masse to illustrate the peculiar double standards that have insinuated itself through the fabric of this society. Men are constantly harassing women with inappropriate lewd remarks to which there can obviously be no response to. Simultaneously, if a woman behaves in a manner anything less than perfectly virtuous, her liberty is instantly forfeit.

In one scene, a woman starts to stand up for herself against a casually tossed piece of innuendo, and the audience can do nothing except anticipate the unjust retaliation that will surely be endorsed by the dozens of common passers-by. There are certain elements of the film that no doubt owe to the nature of making a film under these conditions; extras occasionally can't avoid staring at the camera crew, but strangely enough, this gives the film a feel of documentary film-making that somehow enhances the narrative. Nevertheless, there is nothing amateurish about the acting of the principal women, all of whom behave so convincingly that the film conveys a sense of constant danger. Furthermore, this nervous energy never lets up, as we move from story to story at a speed that allows us to experience discomfort, without reaching closure until the final scene, which in itself is a cause for distress.

It is unlikely that Dayereh will ever be a very popular film, as it has many of the 'feel-bad' qualities of films such as A Time For Drunken Horses, with even less sympathetic sentimentality. On an even sadder note, Dayereh has been banned in Iran, where a film of this nature most desperately needs to reach an audience. However, this seems to be the underlying message of the film; not that there are a great many injustices against women occurring in Iran on a daily basis, but that there is no indication of how or when it will stop. Only why.

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.

This film is directed by the famous Iranian director "Jafar Panahi" who is in prison now because of his political beliefs. "The Circle" won many prizes in the international festivals such as "Venice Film Festival", "San Sebastián International Film Festival", "Singapore International Film Festival", etc. but The Islamic Republic government banned this film in Iran. "The Circle" criticizes the treatment of women in Iran. Panahi gives a chance to amateur actors to play the main roles in the film. All the actors are amateurs, except Fereshteh Sadr Orafai who plays Pari, and Fatemeh Naghavi, who plays the mother abandoning her daughter. I give to "The Circle" 9/10, because I think it has a realistic view to the problems of Iranian Women in my country.

I saw that movie in Toronto and, at the time, I had in mind a few other movies from Iran that I really enjoyed: Gabbeh, A Time for Drunken Horses and Children of Heaven. You could say that I had big expectations for The Circle.

I must admit that halfway through The Circle, I wasn't too pleased. So many characters, what's the link between them, and other questions. Then, I saw the light! We don't need to see what happen with the first characters that we get to know in the movie. We know what is happening to them. We know that they're stuck in a society where they're next to nothing. It's somekind of a circle for those women, never mind what they seem to try, it always come down to the same situation for them.

The movie is informative since it shows us the situation of women in the Iranian society. In the last few years, we have seen some opening from the Iranian government of Khatami. Hopefully, the situation of women will get better, even though there's a lot of resistance from the Islam and the men.

The acting in this one, like in other movies from Iran, is excellent. The actors are no superstars and they play their role naturally. The beautiful Fereshteh Sadr Orfani is excellent in the role of the four month pregnant women who's wishing for an abortion since she's not married.

The camera work in this one is also good even if it sometimes make you a little dizzy. Just like Scorcese in a few scene of Goodfellas or in The Blair Witch Project, the camera is always in movement. We feel like we're part of the action.

A film to open the eyes.

7 out of 10.

"The Circle" is a powerful study of the lives of Iranian women. Another user commented that this film had weak points and might bore some viewers. Part of its atmosphere is conveyed through it's slower-than-Hollywood, well-paced shots which allow the viewer to soak in the feeling of desperation of the women in the film. As the director said in his interview on the DVD version of this film, he does not shoot a film so that it pleases an audience. He is there to shoot a film and make a statement, which he does very well in this film. This is a thought-provoking, very well thought out study of a circle or chain of women who all have something in common, they have committed the crime of being female in Iran. Note how a driver late in the movie gets off scot free and the woman still goes to jail. This is a must-watch if you want a good example of the oppression of many women in that part of the world, not just Iran.

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.

Dayereh (The Circle), made in 2000 by Jafar Panahi takes the hellish universe from his other movies to the extreme. A bunch of women is followed by the camera during one given day. They were out of prison in the morning, they are trying to do anything in their power to not come back there, they are again in jail at evening. It is not explained how did they come out of prison in the morning; it doesn't matter. The movie doesn't show what they are doing all day long; it doesn't matter. The camera just leaves one to follow the other, and so on: glimpses of life.

It is not told why they were imprisoned for the first time: it doesn't matter. A woman can be arrested there seemingly for anything: traveling without being escorted by a male relative, or traveling without documents, or smoking in public, or not having the chador properly arranged, or responding improperly when harassed by men, or traveling escorted by the wrong man, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Any place can be the wrong place, anytime. A woman just gave birth to a daughter, and the in-laws were expecting a boy: the wrong place at the wrong time. The husband could throw her out on the street with the baby, her brothers could not let the woman come back in the home of her parents.

There is no main character in the movie: just a bunch of women followed randomly by a hand-held camera. Women on the run. A perfectly circular universe without possibility of escape. A perfectly crazy universe without fissure. A genially built dystopia. Think at Kafka, think at Orwell.

Is this the real situation of women in that country? Well, it's like asking whether an oppressive regime is really that oppressive. Of course, it is not like that for all women; it is not like that for many women, but that's not the point. Bottom line, it's about women at the mercy of a society whose laws, institutions and traditions are male centered. Most women know the rules of the game, but for any of them there is potentially a wrong place at the wrong time.

Is it such a situation only in one country? Only in one totalitarian ideology, whether religious or secular? I would let the response to you.

Yet another classic Persian movie with intense drama and each story depicted in the movie is intense and holds the audience's attention. It is a movie with multiple stories unfolding one after the other.

The movie starts and ends in a jail in Iran. And, the lives of all the Iranian women in the movie is circumscribed with over-hauling shadows of the men either a father, brother or husband in their life. It was very hard to believe about the plight of the women in the movie and can't help but empathize with them. Sometimes you would feel like stepping in the scene and help the struggling women.

The film seems to have captured the lives of each and every woman in the society in one way or the other. It wonderfully intertwines each story with another and finally ends where it all began. It reminds of the phrase "Life has come a full circle". And, the same happens to each character in the movie.

It is a must watch and if you happen to like the movie, which you would be, then don't miss to watch Jafar Panahi's another classic "The Mirror" as well.

"The Circle" adds to the genre of grim, depressing, didactic feminist movies made by men on non-Anglo cultures that we have seen little on to challenge their viewpoint, such as the Israeli "Kadosh" and the Indian "Bandit Queen." Like the latter, it was banned in its home country, according to the film poster.

The beginning of "The Circle" felt like an out-of-kilter futuristic sci fi movie, as a few chadored women move through a male-crowded modern city (I presume Teheran) filled with the latest contemporary commercial goods.

And the revolutionary society of Iran shown here feels a lot like those futuristic sci fi movies and books influenced by "1984" that presumed that dictatorships of the future would control sex and feelings (as opposed to the dictatorship we actually have in the West of anything goes).

From the jolting opening that gradually challenges our expectations, the most creative part of the movie is how it very slowly reveals the background of each woman as each accidentally crosses paths with others (a similar technique is employed in "Amores Perres").

For each, the only thing that keeps them going is reaching out for female solidarity and support, which results from the regime accidentally throwing them together.

Everyone walking out of the theater turned to each other in unison and said "That was depressing!"

After seeing some excellent Iranian movies last year, I hurried to see this film and I was not disappointed after the screening: it is less poetic than the earlier ones but its simple, excellent story gives a very powerful account of women's life in Iran. This is a sad and rather hopeless life that starts with the unwelcome birth of baby girls, continues with abandoned girl children and culminates with the limited options and freedom women have in their life. We can watch not only how the tragedies of the the main female characters are unfolding but we can also see the humiliating way women are treated by men in their everyday life. I don't want to fall into the usual ignorant Western attitude towards Islamic societies, but this movie was made by Iranians, so it seems that even in Iran there are some people who think that something is wrong with the social status of women in their society.

I also want to stress that the more I think of this movie, the more I like its film-making as well: the acting is excellent, the script is perfect (and even fast-paced, if you don't expect car races or fist fights as a proof of fast-pacedness...), every scene adds something new to the story. The film's message is conveyed to the viewer not only via the story itself: the photography, the close-ups and the cutting powerfully strengthens it.

I'm not that much familiar with Iranian cinema, yet as most people around, I already knew women had serious social problems in the contemporary Iranian society. When I was living in Turkey, we had an Iranian lady staying with our neighbors, a refugee who fled the '79 disaster and was trying to find serenity and freedom in Turkey.

Beginning there, it's very easy to figure this film is not even exaggerated. It's deadly obvious that the actors are amateur, but then again, this proves us mediocre acting doesn't necessarily make a movie bad. Dayereh has considerable might in its ways of depicting the problems women could face in Iran, and the picture selection is exceptional. But all in all, it could have been significantly better with better actors.

I wonder how the Iranian government allowed this motion picture to be shot without giving any trouble to the director, and especially to the women. Hopefully this is a sign indicating things are getting better in Iran!

This movie could have been stronger with better actors, but it's still well worth your 90 minutes. I'm already looking forward to seeing other films of Mr Panahi.

7.5/10

A potent movie, portraying much that is now common knowledge among informed westerners. What was very significant to me was the emotional response it was able to elicit in me despite my prior knowlege of the place women have in many muslim countries. Not only a combination of frustration, anger and despair at the gross injustice perpetrated against women, but the pervasive tension and paranoia generated by a police state.

I thank my lucky stars that I live in the West, with all its foibles.

Where's the Prozac?! After 90 minutes of one of the saddest movies I have ever seen, I felt lucky that I don't live in a country that treats half of its population so badly! Kudos to the film makers for their vision and temerity!

Loved the ingenious technique of the film where the camera starts following one distressed woman to another till all of them are seen together at the end in jail. Nargess Mamzadeh was striking as Nargess, a former convict trying to evade the police. I dont agree that the film should be taken as a symbol of opression of women particularly in theocratic Iran. Most Eastern societies, especially third world ones, are patriarchies the status of women would appear to be depressed particularly through the liberal lens. A number of issues that Western women face are not there in the East. A more balanced work in this regard would be perhaps a documentary to see the pros and cons that a patriarchy has for its female members.

A script with a wonderful structure; an outstanding team of actresses; the most creative sound track I've heard since God knows when(I'm not talking about the music: this is a film you've got to listen to, not just watch); a masterful use of off-screen shots; the best opening sequence I've seen this year: a long shot in the tradition of "Touch of Evil" or "The Player"... Daring and thought-provoking in its contents as well as in its form, you may not find it absolutely perfect, but "The Circle" surely fits my definition of a masterpiece.

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.

The "circle" in Jafar Panahi's great film is many things: the

structure of the film itself, which ends with the same image it

begins with; a location in Teheran, where a character meets a

friend in a movie theater; the circular stairs so many other

characters run up and down; the circling, hovering camera

movements that bring us face to face with the women in these

interlinked stories and the world they are caught in. Most of all,

perhaps, it is the constricting circle within which Iranian women

must live their lives, the tightly circumscribed rules and

expectations of a rigidly masculine universe. None of Panahi's

characters can escape this circle, though some try and one, at

least, believes that she can. The more experienced know the truth;

all they can do in running is map out the circumference of their

shrunken world.

It's easy to see The Circle as a film about the oppression of

women in Iran, but that would reduce it to the merely political--and

we should not forget that the film was made by an Iranian man,

and that three quarters of the Iranian electorate recently voted to

reelect President Khatami, a deeply intelligent voice for freedom

and dialogue who has had his own difficulties being heard.

Panahi's subject is far larger; a woman who grew up in an abusive

household told me that no other film had so accurately depicted

the experience of her youth, when the constraints on women's

lives were so much taken for granted that she was unaware there

was anything outside them. But those constraints are fatal. We

make our world together, through dialogue and interaction. To

deprive someone of voice and the chance to participate in that

process is to kill them, whether it is done through religious and

social sanctions or by a husband beating his wife. Panahi's

women are neither dead nor silent, even though their only

listeners are other women. Their tragedy finds echoes everywhere;

but in this film where theme and expression are so intimately

joined we, at least, can hear them.

In Jafar Panahi's claustral feature debut, the brilliant central conceit is that being a woman in Iran is exactly equivalent to being the Wrong Man in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. In the movie's nameless Iranian city, the narrative baton is handed off from one woman to another, each of them missing an ID card, a chaperoning male, some form of social validation; without it, the long arm of the law winds around each woman like a python. Panahi's style--long, fluid takes that are at once bruisingly verite and dreamlike--buckles in the script's ingenious (and perhaps unconscious) major device: in this movie, women are a secret underworld with nodding, unspoken signals, just like hoodlums silently acknowledging one another in a gangster picture. There is no warm-hug sisterhood here, just the desperate mutual regard of the about-to-be-caught.

The honesty and unfussiness of the style of contemporary Iranian directors enables them to get away with stuff other artists might not, such as the ending of this movie, which, in a European or American movie, might seem thuddingly unsubtle. Here, it seems like the fulfillment of a nightmare--and it works because of Panahi's wittily blunt style, which is pitched somewhere between Iranian neorealism and Elaine May's MIKEY AND NICKY. And it works because of our constant recognition of the literal, physical courage of the movie: our glimpses of current state attitudes toward abortion, prostitution and corrupt police are so bald one marvels at Panahi's (and the cast and crew's) effrontery. Never has chador seemed less exotic and more evil--a manifestation of a terror of the beauty and pleasure of the female body that seems to engulf each character like a Cronenbergian plague. (The movie's wittiest touch is Cronenbergian, too: a woman character has a tic that gives her away to the cops--pregnancy-induced vomiting.)

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.