Football Under Cover

In 2006 Jafar Panahi’s film Offside, about girls who tried to sneak into a football match in Tehran, became an audience success at Film from the South. In the documentary Fotball under Cover we meet girls who are not content with watching: they want to conquer the playing field. The film follows a German team to the first girls’ match played on Iranian soil after the revolution. With humour and playfulness the film illustrates the unfair treatment of Iranian women. Through encounters with the Iranian girls and their mothers, we also get to see another Iran: an Iran where girls refuse to fall into line, where any small, individual protest is important and where the memory of earlier freedom lives on. For example, did you know that Iran established a special girls’ team in football as early as in 1968? tsr