General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Circle (دایره) (2000 film)

The Circle (Persian: دایره, Dayereh) is a 2000 Iranian drama film directed by Jafar Panahi that follows a chain of women through a single day and night in Tehran as they struggle against the restrictions imposed on women in Iran. It won the Golden Lion at the 57th Venice International Film Festival and was banned from public release in Iran.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Dayereh (دایره); Italian release title Il cerchio³
Director, editor, producer	Jafar Panahi; screenplay by Kambuzia Partovi and Panahi; cinematography by Bahram Badakhshani¹
Production	Jafar Panahi Film Productions (Iran) with Mikado Film and Lumière & Co. (Italy); 90 minutes, 35 mm²
Principal cast	Nargess Mamizadeh, Maryiam Palvin Almani, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy, Mojgan Faramarzi, Elham Saboktakin, Fatemeh Naghavi, Monir Arab¹
Venice 2000	Golden Lion for Best Film, FIPRESCI Prize, UNICEF Prize, and Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury²
Censorship	Shooting permit withheld for nine months; banned in Iran after completion¹
Box office	$756,035 worldwide, of which $440,554 in the United States (distributor WinStar Cinema)⁴

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film weaves together the stories of several women over the course of a single day and night in Tehran. It opens in a maternity ward, where a baby girl has just been born to a family whose husband's relatives had expected a boy; the first line of dialogue is "It's a girl."¹^•² From there the story shifts from character to character: three women recently out of prison, one of whom wants an abortion; a prostitute; and a mother forced to give up her daughter.²

A relay structure. Rather than parallel editing, each woman's story hands its focus to the next, forming what the Karlovy Vary festival catalog calls a closed circle, a symbol of confinement in which women are limited by orthodox society and trying to go beyond its limits is a punishable act.² The New Zealand International Film Festival notes described it as a relay structure, a chain of stories connected more by intuition and theme than by transaction.⁵ The film also reads as the story of a woman's experiences over an entire lifetime, from birth in the morning to maturity late at night, and the first and last shots are white-to-black mirrors of one another.¹ Circle imagery recurs throughout the movie, which Panahi stocks with such motifs, ranging from the form of the jail cell to the cinema's staircase.¹

Panahi explained the title in a 2004 interview: "The circle is a shape that I am particularly fond of and which is perfectly suited to the society in which we live. The circular structure of my films allows me to denounce both the confinement of Iranian society and the energy the characters put into, if not escaping, then at least widening the circumference of that restraint."⁶

Production and censorship

The film was Panahi's third feature, after The White Balloon (1995), which won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes, and The Mirror (1997).¹ In an interview with Stephen Teo published in Senses of Cinema in 2001, Panahi said production took 53 days from beginning to end, with about 18 idle days in the middle because of bad weather, for 37 days of filming.⁷ He cast a mix of professionals and amateurs, choosing whoever fit each role; the professional, he said, has to come down and adapt to the level of the amateurs, learning to be natural rather than to perform.⁷

Permits withheld. After President Khatami's 1997 election on a platform of liberalization, conservatives attacked a cinema they saw as ignoring the position of women and trampling sharia rules. Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) denied Panahi a permit to shoot the film for nine months, conceding only after protests over the silencing of a Cannes prize-winner.¹ Panahi told Teo that permission took about ten months and came with a letter saying the finished film would be evaluated to see whether it could be shown.⁷

After completing the film, Panahi made multiple prints and hid them around the country because of censorship fears. One print was submitted to the Venice Film Festival and announced as part of the 2000 program before a permit had been granted; the MCIG gave the permit three days before the screening, caught between domestic and international demands.¹ The Iranian government nonetheless kept the film from general release in Iran, and it was banned for its "completely dark and humiliating perspective" and for being "offensive to Muslim women."⁸^•¹ Despite the ban, the film had some surreptitious screenings in Iran and was selected as best film of the year by the Iranian Cinema Guilds; because of the ban, the top award could not be announced at the ceremony, and Panahi, who attended, accepted his prize after the event concluded.⁹

Style

The film uses a documentary-like visual style with many long takes and few cuts.¹ The cast was largely non-professional; according to the NZIFF notes, only the distraught mother was played by a professional actress, and the soundtrack relies on ambient sound rather than unmotivated music.⁵ Panahi frequently shows the women looking without showing what they see, asking audiences to make their own mental images instead of getting those images from him.⁹ Peter Bradshaw, reviewing the film for The Guardian in 2001, wrote that its pace is slow, with aimless handheld shots, and that the significance of each scene is not pointed up but unspools like the traffic of real life; he also noted the film is candid about the reality of the sex industry in Iran.¹⁰

Reception and awards

At the 57th Venice International Film Festival in 2000, the film won the Golden Lion for Best Film, the FIPRESCI Prize (whose jury cited its "imaginative blending of content and form, to deal with the situation of women in any patriarchal society"), the UNICEF Prize, and a Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury.²^•¹¹ The international critics' federation FIPRESCI also named it Film of the Year for 2000.¹² The American National Board of Review of Motion Pictures gave the film its Freedom of Expression Award.¹³

Critical response has remained strong. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 94% Tomatometer rating from 65 reviews, with the critics' consensus calling it "bleak, yet powerful" and "a searing indictment of the oppressive conditions experienced by women in Iran."¹⁴ In 2023, Time included it in its list of the 100 best movies of the past ten decades.¹⁵

Commercial release. The film opened in limited release in New York on April 13, 2001, distributed by WinStar Cinema, and in the United Kingdom on September 21, 2001.¹⁶ Its lifetime theatrical gross was $756,035 worldwide, including $440,554 in the United States and later re-releases in Europe and Latin America.⁴

Place in Panahi's career

The Circle marked Panahi's move away from the children's films made under the influence of Abbas Kiarostami toward a direct treatment of the plight of women in Iran, and it was this film that led the Iranian authorities to consider him a threat.⁶ The Yale Film Archive notes say it cemented his place as a leading figure of the Iranian New Wave.¹ In 2010 Panahi was placed under house arrest and given a 20-year ban on writing or directing for the cinema; he has continued to make films.⁹ With the Golden Lion for The Circle, the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2025 for It Was Just an Accident, and the Golden Bear at Berlin for Taxi, Panahi joined Henri-Georges Clouzot, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Robert Altman as directors who have won all three top prizes.¹⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026