In The Mirror, Jafar Panahi’s previous film, the challenges faced by women in Iran’s patriarchal society could be sensed around the edges. In The Circle, written by Kambuzia Partovi and directed by Panahi, they’re front and center, as well as multifaceted. Something like a cinematic relay race, the camera follows a character for a good amount of time, then gets handed off to another, and then another—all women struggling in their own way to survive amidst threats, direct and indirect, from male relatives, men on the street, and policing soldiers. There is Nargess (Nargess Mamizadeh), who has snuck out of prison on the morning when the movie takes place and scurries through the streets of Tehran like a cautious rabbit, trying to avoid the prowling, wolfish police. And Pari (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaee), unmarried, pregnant, and left at the mercy of a female doctor friend who is unwilling to risk her reputation. And a mother (Fatemeh Naghavi), so distraught at the prospects for her young daughter under her care that she considers abandoning the girl on the street. Panahi films all of this with a fly-on-the-wall camera—at times jostlingly intimate, at others from a furtive distance. Filming on Tehran’s streets, he immerses his actors in the busy (mostly male) life bustling about them, while also finding moments of inspired, location composition—as when Nargess crouches against a wall next to a gated door, its bars casting a reminding shadow of her prison stint. The movie concludes with a crushing bookend that I don’t dare spoil. The “circle” of the film seems to be not only the commercial area of Tehran referenced at one point, but the lives of women living in Iran: stuck in a loop of patriarchal oppression, desperately seeking dignity in a society that offers them none.
(8/5/2026)
