Circumstance (2011)

Interesting facts

• Filmed in: Lebanon
• Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: Sundance Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic

Circumstance is a 2011 drama film written and directed by Maryam Keshavarz starring Nikohl Boosheri, Sarah Kazemy, Reza Sixo Safai and Keon Alexander. It explores homosexuality in modern Iran, among other subjects.

Production

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.

Boosheri said that the film creators chose Beirut, Lebanon as the filming location because "[i]t was the right Middle Eastern feeling, it had the essence. And in Iran we wouldn’t have had the freedom to do what we did." Because the militant Shia Islamist group Hezbollah, supported by the Iranian government, operated in Lebanon, the filmmakers did not wish to make the true intention of the film public at the time of the filming.

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