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Originally Published 12/21/2015 @ http://thefounder.thedailyoutsider.com/2015/12/winding-down-2015-on-our-world.html

       ‘This film isn’t about fucking, it’s about human rights’, says the Iranian-American youth in Maryam Kesharvaz’ Circumstance, which opened in the UK on Friday. Surprisingly, despite winning the Sundance Film Festival's audience award last year, it doesn't seem overly to have  impressed any audiences over here.  Reviews in the national press have called it ‘crude and predictable’ and essentially making excessive use of the ‘trowel’ as a laying-on utensil where the teaspoon would do. Perhaps the most attention-worthy criticism, however, would be that of Leila Mouri, Iranian women’s rights activist and writer for the Huffington Post, who calls the film ‘a very trivial portrayal of Iranian youths’ sexual desires,’ as opposed to the revolutionary portrayal of sexual minorities that it could be. The opening comment on human rights and fucking does not, I should add, reference Circumstance itself. The speaker is attempting to persuade his Iranian friends to help him dub Gus Van Sant’s ‘Milk’ into Farsi, and to understand the seriousness of his agenda. Mouri’s contention is with the latent message that the Iranian teenagers in the film need an American to stir their political conscience. As it appears in the 107mins on offer, the only right they particularly care about is the right to fuck. I wonder, though, whether the same would be said of a film that dealt specifically with the right to freedom of speech or freedom in education. In a film which tells the tale of two female lovers in a country where ‘morality police’ form a menacing presence and homosexuality is a hang-able offence, the right to sexual freedom seems a pretty important one, no? Circumstance doesn’t undermine other political travesties, it just doesn’t have space to deal with them all. It’s like saying Milk didn’t pay enough attention to the civil rights of California’s dairy farmers. I will not pretend that the film’s various episodes of sexual fantasy weren’t sometimes lurid and a teeny bit cringe-inducing. The porno-style music and lingering closeups on one particularly full-lipped characters mouth might justify the trowel comments, but the excess and sexual freedom (however jarring) of these scenes are precisely what the film seeks to champion as common rights. The protagonists are teenagers, seeking rebellion in underground parties fueled by booze and drugs. They haven’t had time to prune their sexual fantasies to nice respectable and tasteful ones. The desires of the film’s two lovers are real and devastating, and as relevant to the cause of Iran’s sexual minorities as those of any fully-fledged adult. Following release, both Circumstance and its director are now banned substances in Iran. In London, the film is currently showing only in the Institute for Contemporary Arts – hardly apt for an ‘audience award’ winner. Superficial flaws aside, the film is deeply affecting. As I see it, this makes the disappointment of critics, and the indifference of distributors, a real shame.