Director: Ja’far Panahi
Script: Kambuzia Partovi and Ja’far Panahi
Director of Photography: Bahram Badakhshani
Stars: Nargess Mamizadeh, Maryam Parvin Almani, Modjgan Faramarzi, Elham Saboktakin, Monir Arab, Sulmaz Panahi, Fereshteh Sadr Orafai, Fatemeh Naghav.
A joint Iran-Italy-Switzerland production, 2000
The film starts with a still on a porthole to the maternity ward in a hospital somewhere in Teheran. One can hear the cries of a woman in labour. The window opens and a nurse gives the news of a girl born to Sulmaz Gholami to her waiting mother. The mother is disbelieving. She assures the nurse that the ultrasound had predicted a baby boy and asks her to go and check again. When assured that the baby is indeed female she leaves the hospital looking dejected. On the way out she meets two female relatives and tells them of the sad fate awaiting her daughter. Her in-laws will demand a divorce.
So begins the film proper with three girls which during as the film progresses become clear are political prisoners who have been given temporary leave from the prison. They and are on the run. Arezoo, one of the trio finds out after a hurried telephone call that a fourth girl, Maedeh, had been recaptured. Arezoo and Nargess obtain some money from a relative of Arezoo who then decides against travelling as she is convinced her family will reject her.
Nargess buys a bus ticket but is scared of boarding it when she notices a revolutionary guard checking all the on-going passengers. So Nargess and Arezoo go in search of their other friend, Pari. Pari is pregnant from her lover, who has since been executed and is looking for a refuge. Pari tries her father’s house but manages to escape when her fanatical brothers arrive on a motor bike to beat her up. She then turns to Elham, a fellow ex-prisoner who now works in a hospital having married a Pakistani doctor after her release.
She too shuns her and declines to help, on the excuse that she had hidden her past life, and prison sentence from her husband. Pari then meets another ex-prisoner Nayyereh who too turns out to be without a refuge. Her husband had taken on another wife while she was in prison. She is even thankful of the second wife for looking after her children. She has decided to move away from them so that her children might be happy. She now sells tickets in a cinema.
Finally hopeless and without anywhere to spend the night Pari, tired and frightened comes across an unknown woman who because of poverty is leaving her only daughter in the street so that she may have a better fate than her. She then boards a car of an elderly man, who then turns out to be at the head in the “Committee Against Immorality” [1], and hands her over as a prostitute.
The last woman in the film, is a prostitute at the end of her tether. A women who when the same elderly Komiteh chief asks her why she is doing this answers fearlessly: “are you going to pay for my keep?
In the end all the women of the film, but Elham, are arrested and the film ends totally pessimistically with the prison gate closing by the prison guard and the announcement that Sulmaz Gholami, the mother of the baby girl at the opening scene, has also been arrested.
The circle may be the first film that depicts the situation of women in Iran in a true light. This is Panahi’s third film following on from the White Balloon (1995) and Mirror (1997). It bears witness to Jafar Panahi’s perceptive eye of the vulnerability of women in Islamic Iran. With this film Panahi declares that from the moment a woman is born she becomes ensnared in a circle that brings nothing but misery, wretchedness and vulnerability.
The only road open to those who wish to escape this circle is to hide part of yourself and your life. This is what Elham, the only women in the film who is not among the prisoners chose – to always walk with a mask. This is a mask that estranges you from your friends and even from yourself. This is the “hidden half” that Tahmineh Milani alluded to in her latest film with the same name and is now paying the price.
Panahi said in an interview that he got the idea for this film from the news story of a woman who murdered her two little girls before committing suicide. This is an event that has not been unusual in Iran in recent times. During the entire film we see images of broken, tired and anxious women who knock on this or that door for shelter. These women are even allowed the elementary right to smoke, an act that has not been banned in any Islamic law or book.
On the other hand the men can do whatever they please freely. It even transpires through a telephone conversation that one of the revolutionary guards has a relation with a married woman. And the middle aged man, who appears to be in charge of one of the offices against “corruption and immorality” can pick up a woman in his car, while ultimately it is this woman who must be arrested and imprisoned.
Ja’far Panahi has pictured these personalities bravely in his film. Yet The Circle is an incomplete film. Its next instalment could perhaps depict the serial murder of the many homeless women roaming the streets. They are thousands. Twenty one of them were recently found murdered by their own scarves in identical fashion [2].
The Circle is in reality a symbol of the real place and status occupied by women in the twenty-four year the Islamic Republic has ruled the country. The film paints a culture that is nothing short of a disgrace for the leaders of the Islamic government.
November 2001
1. Komiteh mobarezeh ba monkerat – a security force that roams the street punishing such illegal acts showing a few strands of hair or using makeup by women.
2. See The Real Spider Behind the “Spider Killings” iran bulletin no 29-30, Autumn 2001.