Kicking back

This Iranian, football-themed fiction is released just in time for the World Cup - their team plays in Germany on Sunday.

Fly-onthewall style, it follows a group of young women desperate to get into the vital qualifying match at the Azadi stadium in Teheran between the home country and Bahrain.

Being female, they are not allowed in. But they do argue with the young army conscripts who nervously detain them in a makeshift pen. One of them, audaciously dressed in a boyish military disguise, asks why, if women are allowed to play soccer, they can't actually watch it. The soldiers have no answer, but they can't disobey orders. Moral confusion reigns supreme.

Like the girls themselves, we never see any football, though we do hear the cheers and groans during the match and witness the enormous enthusiasm of the crowds as they come out with Iran victorious. The girls and the conscripts join in and, on the bus back home, they watch as seemingly the whole of Teheran celebrates.

The film only just makes full feature length, and it does so by stretching out several of its sequences rather too long.

It also has a faux-naïve quality that is sometimes irritating, as if its screenplay were largely improvised by its amateur cast on the spur of the moment.

Even so, it is the kind of immediate-looking story, shot with a handheld camera, that could well be mistaken for a documentary. And it's another example of Jeffer Panahi, one of Iran's leading filmmakers, putting two fingers up in the general direction of the authorities. This comedy of manners gently, but firmly, pokes fun at the country's absurd rules and regulations. It won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival and was instantly banned in Iran.

The director hasn't been as audacious this time as he was with Crimson Gold. But you only have to reflect on the ban to realise that you can't say much in a movie without irritating the mullahs.

Offside
Cert: PG