Movies - The Circle

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	Movies - The Circle

The Circle (Dayereh) is a 2000 film by Iranian independent filmmaker Jafar Panahi that focuses on the treatment of women in Iran. Dayereh has won Golden Lion of Venice Film Festival in 2000, among other awards.

The film is composed of a series of stories that interconnect to describe various incidents in the lives of women, centering around a small group that was on leave from prison, and their attempt to negotiate modern Tehran in a single day. Throughout the film, other women's lives are interspersed to provide insights into the everyday challenges women face in Iran, where even walking alone in the street or smoking a cigarette in public is practically prohibited. Each story intersects, but none of them are complete, leaving the viewer to imagine both the background and the ending.

Throughout the movie, Panahi focuses on the little rules symbolizing difficulties of life for Iranian women, such as the need to wear a chador under certain circumstances or not being allowed to travel alone. He puts several aspects of life in contemporary Tehran in contrast: A marriage party, symbolizing a happy ending, in front of an abandoned girl, a soldier before a Basiji, married women vs. wandering girls, a romantic melody that all Iranians would recollect vs. a cruel bazar and etc.

Though his cast consisted of amateur actresses, he managed to capture the sense of despair that pervades every aspect of their life. The Circle is perhaps the best known of Panahi's works, yet it is banned in Iran.

Plot

The film begins in a maternity ward of a hospital, where the mother of Solmaz Gholami is upset to learn that her daughter has just given birth to a girl, even though the ultrasound indicated that the baby would be a boy. Worrying that her in-laws will force their son to divorce her daughter, she tells another daughter to call her uncles.

At the phone booth, she runs into three prisoners, including Arezou and Nargess, who have just been released. They are trying to come up with money so that they can go to Nargess's home village. The third prisoner is immediately arrested, as she tries to pawn a gold chain, leaving just the two women. Arezou eventually finds enough money to get Nargess a bus ticket, and the two of them separate.

At the bus station, however, Nargess can't get on the bus, because it is being searched, and she is afraid that she will be arrested again. Instead she tries to find another prisoner, Pari, who sneaked out of the prison that day. Pari's father will not let her in the house, however, and just as she leaves, Pari's two brothers appear to "talk" to their sister. She manages to escape, and eventually makes her way to a hospital where she finds Elham, another former prisoner who has hidden her past and is now a nurse, married to a doctor.

From her conversation with Elham, we learn that Pari is pregnant, but the father of her baby has been executed, and she has no one to approve her having an abortion. Elham, after being released, became too conservative to do anything to help her, so Pari is left to wander the streets at night. Without ID, she cannot get into a hotel. At a street corner, she finds a mother trying to abandon her little girl, hoping that she will find a better life with a family. She continues wandering the street.

The mother is first caught as a prostitute, but she later manages to escape. Then another woman who was picked up as a prostitute, is taken to prison. She is placed in a cell with other women we met so far in the movie, and the phone rings outside the metal door. A guard answers and comes to the window, calling for Solmaz Gholami, the woman with a girl baby in the first scene. So is the circle closed.

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