Circumstance (2011 film)
| Circumstance | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| شرایط | |
| Directed by | Maryam Keshavarz |
| Written by | Maryam Keshavarz |
| Starring |
Nikohl Boosheri Sarah Kazemy Reza Sixo Safai Keon Mohajeri |
| Music by | Gingger Shankar |
| Cinematography | Brian Rigney Hubbard |
| Edited by | Andrea Chignoli |
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Production
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| Distributed by |
Participant Media Roadside Attractions |
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Release date
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Running time
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107 minutes |
| Language | Persian |
| Budget | $1 million |
| Box office | $555,511 |
Circumstance (Persian: شرایط Šar'ayet) is a 2011 dramatic film written and directed by Maryam Keshavarz starring Nikohl Boosheri, Sarah Kazemy, and Reza Sixo Safai. It explores homosexuality in modern Iran, among other subjects.
Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) is the teenage daughter of a wealthy Iranian family in Tehran. She and her best friend, the orphaned Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) attend illicit parties and experiment with sex, drinking, and drugs.
Atafeh's brother Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai) is a recovering drug addict who becomes increasingly religious and obsessed with Shireen, coinciding with the collapse of his once-strong relationship with his sister.
The heads of the family are the Hakimi parents, Firouz and Azar, who reminisce on their youth and what has become and what will become of their family.
Set in Iran and released with subtitled Persian dialogue, the film was shot in Lebanon.Circumstance contains a few English and French phrases. The budget was less than US$1 million.
Maryam Keshavarz, the director, was raised in the United States but spent summers in Shiraz, Iran. She used experiences in Shiraz to direct towards the movie, such as being very adventurous and experimenting within the scenes of partying and hearing about her cousin's whipping at the hands of the morality police, in the plot. Circumstance was the first full-length feature film she directed.
Keshavarz said that she wanted to make as authentic to Iranian culture as possible because, while Circumstance would likely be banned in Iran, Iranians would see the film via illegally imported copies. All of the main actors were fluent in Persian. Because the Persian they knew was dated from before the 1979 Iranian revolution, the film creators used a dialect coach. Of the actors of the three most prominent characters, all were members of the Iranian diaspora and were born to parents who left Iran around the time of the revolution, and all three had family members in Iran. Two of those actors visited family in Iran. Nikohl Boosheri, who did not visit relatives in Iran, said that she socialized with Iranians in her hometown, Vancouver, British Columbia, to get a better idea of what the contemporary Persian spoken in Iran was like; many of them were recent immigrants from Iran. Sarah Kazemy, a Paris resident, visited relatives in Tehran while researching her role. She said goodbye to her relatives before leaving Iran; because of her role in the film, Iranian authorities could prevent her from entering the country for much of the foreseeable future.
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