Discovered: May 21, 2026 20:17 (UTC) Tom Chick:: Best thing I’ve seen since February 28, 2026: Offside ¦ Patreon <– Gotta Watch ‘The Circle’ and ‘Offside’ some day!!

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My favorite Jafar Panahi movie, however, is The Circle, where all the lead actors are pitch-perfect, surprisingly varied, and wonderfully expressive considering they’re all women acting from within their hijabs. It’s an unforgettable script, a cannily daisy-chained set of short stories; eat your Raymond Carver-loving heart out, Robert Altman! But unlike Offside, it’s bleak, without much hope, a despairing look at women in a male-dominated theocracy.

It’s especially hard to watch these movies while the county is being pummeled by airstrikes. It certainly makes it easier to understand conflicting emotions expressed like this, quoted by the BBC from an Iranian man named Kaveh: “I had always imagined [the death of Khamenei] would feel like happiness, but it didn’t. Almost all the years of my life and the lives of millions like me were destroyed and thousands lost their lives - and yet he himself was removed from the scene in a single moment, [which] made me truly angry.”

Jafar Panahi is basically exiled from Iran. But his son, the director of Hit the Road, was in Iran when the US and Israeli airstrikes began. I hope both of them get to make many more movies, and I would love for them to be able to continue telling me stories about Iran. My heart goes out to them and everyone else swept up in this awful and unnecessary war. I hope it ends soon.

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