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On Boosheri: Boy by Band of Outsiders’s black wool blazer and pants; Cushnie et Ochs’s white silk satin shirt with leather collar and placket. On Kazemy: Helmut Lang’s black viscose blazer; DKNY’s cream crepe de chine shirt; the Lake & Stars’s black cotton bra
Nikohl Boosheri & Sarah Kazemy
The provocative screen debut by two Iranian actresses.
August 2011
Actresses Nikohl Boosheri (left) and Sarah Kazemy claim that they’re a
bit baffled at characterizations of Circumstance—winner of an Audience
Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and opening this month—as “a
hot, lesbian Persian film,” despite its sensual depiction of two
schoolgirls experimenting with their nascent sexuality in repressive
Tehran. (That it was deemed “anti-Islamic” by the Iranian media didn’t
surprise them a bit, though.) “They have this kind of relationship that
happens a lot with young girls,” says Boosheri, a Vancouver native who
plays the rebellious daughter of a wealthy liberal family. “You fall in
love, and you create this safe place to experiment and grow, but I don’t
think they’d have this relationship with any other woman. We never saw
it as a gay film.” The movie—shot in Lebanon in Farsi with English
subtitles—is also striking for its rare depiction of Tehran’s pulsing
underground club scene. Western dress is de rigueur at parties, and a
pirated copy of Milk is dubbed into Farsi behind closed doors. It’s a
world that both actresses, making their film debuts, researched in
depth: The Paris-based Kazemy visited relatives in Tehran to experience
it firsthand, while Boosheri went online, only to encounter for herself
the state surveillance that ultimately pulls the screen lovers apart.
“I’d go to Google Images and find these pictures of boys and girls
dressed in jeans, tank tops, and makeup—no scarves—smoking and dancing,”
she says. “But when I’d click on one of them, I wouldn’t be able to find
it. And by the time I’d refresh the page, it wouldn’t be there anymore.”
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