Faramarz Beheshti Director of Salam Rugby

How did you actually manage to shoot your movie in Iran, in all the places where no men were allowed? Basically I was under the umbrella of the Iranian Rugby Federation for almost two years. I was officially a contractor for them and had their help in exchange for covering a lot of their events. They had to apply for all the paperwork, which was crucial. All in all, I collected over 200 permissions to shoot the film. So I was lucky to be able to do what I did by slipping through the nets. When you watch the film, you realize that the only place where you don’t see me filming the practice of the girls is in Tehran. There’s no way to slip security there. But if you move around in the country, it depends on who is the head of the local rugby federation, how they are connected with the security forces and so on. But if I would have had to approach the ministry… oh, forget it..!

Would you agree that the women themselves think of sport as a route to self fulfillment and as a way of feminizing society? When you talk about sports, you have to make a separation, as there are two Irans. One is the urban Iran, where people think differently about emancipation and morality. And there’s the provincial one. There, sport is one of the few activities the girls have left. Since the Islamic Revolution, you can’t just go for a walk in the park with a friend, as society sees you as a girl of loose morals. If you criticize it, you’re an enemy of the State. The truth is that for girls in provincial Iran sport is one of the few possibilities to spend time outside of their homes and to get entertainment. When you go to the bigger cities there are more alternatives for them. Why rugby? They are just curious! Whether they all end up as professional rugby players, I doubt it. But while some families think that it’s not a good thing for their daughters or wives to go to a cinema, joining a state-controlled institution like a sports club is fine by them.

Isn’t the regime’s ideology paradoxically sexualizing the whole of society? All those regimes that are trying to impose a moral ideology see women as objects. They are not seen as human beings. How else could you say that in court, the testimony of a woman is worth half of the one made by a man? There’s one show on TV where this Mullah is teaching sex education. He is talking about the male problem of not being able to satisfy their women because they are too quick. He is standing there and suggesting - on national TV! - that before you have proper sex with your wife, you should use her to relieve yourself before the actual act of sex - like a rubber doll. And this ideology tells you that if a woman goes to the movies, she probably also sleeps with men randomly. If you put your hand on such a woman she hasn’t the right to object and that’s the way she’s treated also by the police, later the judges and so on.

Do you think there’s hope for an improvement of the situation for women in Iran? Our silence on that subject for the last 33 years has contributed to making the situation worse, actually. Today, people are powerless. If a person dares to question the Hijab, it means capital punishment. The ideology is that strong. Also some of these barbaric customs like female circumcision and genital mutilation, which are Arab traditions, also take place in some villages in Iran. Definitely the way of thinking of women as objects will give odd customs and practices a chance to return. But thanks to feminist work on that subject it became public that in some villages things like that happen.

By Michaela and Jens