*some potential spoilers below*This film raised a lot of questions for me...including Where was this filmed? It seems in Iran for much of it.Why does Nargess not board the bus at once? Would she still have been subject to the official search that we see from above later? When she purchased that shirt was that to tie her back to the "flirtation" with the man who earlier was seen decorating the wedding car?Are Iranian doors really so narrow? I'm specifically referring to Pari's house, also was it obvious to other viewers that the men that stormed that place after Nargess visits were Pari's brothers??Was that orange soda an Iranian product placement?Okay, that last question is not in earnest. I'll take the scourge of crass commercialization over invisible imprisonment (but it would be estimable to avoid both as a society ultimately.)However my first question stands. For this film to be made (partially?) in Iran suggests to me a less draconian presence of persecution. Did the actresses (and non-actresses) all have proper ID cards and clearance themselves? Are the various inquisitors too busy stopping women, to peruse the dailies?I have no desire to defend a country wherein clerics get to decide who can and cannot run for office. But in another film, I would almost like to see some attempt to show complex characters who do defend the need for ID cards and chaperones and women living in the shadows of their chadors.When I interview Firoozeh Dumas regarding her universally enjoyable book "Funny in Farsi" I made the mistake of thinking that returning to Iran was prohibitive for her and her Iranian-American family. She corrected me on that. And I recall Western attitudes about Russia in the 1980's that proved to be misguided (or perhaps very truly guided towards misinformation.)While I had questions, I do think director Panahi is one who invites open questions to this film. His avoidance of back histories to the women featured here helps us to feel as if we are on the lam with them. The hand-held camera (its shakiness on the large screen I think would pose some trouble for folks like my wife) also helped the audience to share the worried nature of the characters.The approach to this film struck me as the approach of an auteur. Thus, this film is more likely to stand aside Eisenstein than Weinstein...more likely to be shown at the Pacific Film Archives than the "arty, upscale" multiplex. I do think this will prove to be a favorite in classrooms, I get the feeling that Panahi achieved a lot with very little to start with.Women are often shot behind bars, cleverly so. At a cinema ticket booth, through a hospital window screen, outside by a gate. The film starts with a woman screaming in agony, and I did not know *right* away that it was a woman giving birth. It did become clear pretty quickly, but as I reflect back it could be that the pain for women is not just confined to labor. The camera travels like a virus from one woman, one story, at a time. As one other reviewer mentioned this reminded me of "Slacker" (I've not seen "La Ronde.")I referred to the chadors above, while I still don't know a chador from a burkha...there seemed to be different ones worn by different women throughout. I suspect some sort of significance. The all-white one of Elham really stood out for me.The contrast of that, and her apparent success in getting out of the societal prison she was stuck in versus the strife her circle of sisters still must endure was stark. As stark as the white versus black garments, as stark as the wedding procession that runs blithely through the film and as stark as the footage provided here.I'm glad I saw this...and suspect you will be as well. I look forward to watching more of Panahi's films and hope there will be more artistic exchanges between the U.S. and Iran. Indeed the film I probably want to see, would be the one that *both* governments would like to ban. Has our Attorney General Ashcroft seen any Iranian films that disturbed him recently??7/10

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.

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.

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.