Offside

Interrogating inequality by showing the equality in bonding against it. Offside follows a handful of women who try to sneak in to a soccer game where only men are allowed. On the surface, they fail: they are caught and closed away from the match, kept in a holding area on…

Lara Pop

Early in Offside, an elderly man offers an explanation to a couple of younger men who ask him why, to preserve his health, he doesn’t stay home to watch the game on TV: "But the stadium is something else. You shout, you chant, you do the Wave. But best of all, you can…

Afra Nariman

It’s the calmness of that closing scene that makes everything hit a little harder, the camera stays steady, holding on the girls sitting at the center of the frame, all listening intently to the radio commentary. There’s no background score, just the sound of the match and…

Hamza

Football. No other sport in this world elicits rapturous frenzy among its fans.True passion can be seen in their eyes.Without showing one scene on the field itself i could feel every minute of the game come alive.Issues of gender discrimination are tackled…

Varghese

Iranian girls just wanna have fun. Offside, an absurdist comedy from the legendary Jafar Panahi, tackles the deep-rooted misogyny in his home country with a modern allegory that touches way deeper than its subject matter represents. In Iran, women are not allowed to…

nick

Kind of miraculous that Panahi can make a rigorous critique of archaic gender restrictions AND make it hilarious, feel-good, and adorable without feeling sugar-coated. With a few brief exceptions, there aren't really any bad guys or unlikeable characters. The guards come…

buckett

Jafar panahi understands that the role of the artist is to ask the questions not to answer them

munta

So, the fact is one of the greatest movies of all time is shot in a day capturing raw emotions in real-time, which is bound to elicit euphoria for any sports lover or film enthusiast in general.

Sahin Mondal

The minimalist digital cinematography lends immediacy to the images, a real-time urgency which works together well with Panahi's subtle brand of formalism. Bars, frames and architecture seem to constantly obstruct the hand-held image, in the same way that these 5 central…

Luke McCarthy