Banned in its home country, Jafar Panahi's latest film focuses on the harrowing plight of women in post-Shah Iran.  The Circle, which won the top prize (as well as four others) at last year's Venice Film Festival, tells three different yet painfully similar stories, and all feature performances from non-professional actresses whose faces can exude more pain and anguish that the top 10 U.S. box office stars would be able to muster if you pooled their meager talents.  Julia Schmulia – these young women are the ultimate Method actors, having grown up not knowing anything but their country's injustice and prejudice toward women.  Some of the actresses' parents protested Panahi because they felt his rabble-rousing subject matter could permanently damage the reputation of their daughters.

Shooting every scene with a handheld camera, Panahi ups the stakes by omitting the background of each of The Circle's characters.  The first chapter shows three women trying to turn their temporary freedom from prison into a more permanent independence.  We don't know what any of them have done to deserve a prison sentence - we assume it couldn't have been much - nor do we know how they got out.  The trio is a little like The Powerpuff Girls in that one is a quick-thinking leader, one beats up boys who harass them for traveling without a man (a big no-no for Iranian women) and one is a cute lil' fraidycat.

Of course, the real Powerpuffs wouldn't have gotten nabbed trying to sell a gold chain on the street to get money for a bus ticket out of town, which is what happens here.  The cops grab one girl, but Arezou (Maryiam Palvin Almani) and Nargess (Nargess Mamizadeh) are able to elude capture.  Yet even after Arezou mysteriously obtains a wad of cash to make the journey to Nargess' home, the story becomes painfully tragic before Panahi neatly moves us on to the next episode.

The next two stories involve motherhood in one way or another.  Pari (Fereshteh Sadr Orfani, the mother from Panahi's The White Balloon and his assistant director here) is pregnant and desperately wants an abortion.  She has just been kicked out of her house and is on the lam, but hopes a former prison-mate-turned-nurse can help her out.  Pari is flabbergasted when she sees a mother named Nayereh abandon her young child on the street.  The film ends with a haunting shot - in a sweeping circle, no less - that shows the outcome of each of the three stories, in addition to the heartbreaking epilogue to a brief and almost forgotten story that preceded The Circle's opening credits.

If this was an American film, the women would defy their oppressors in a way that would make you want to stand up, pump your fist and shout, "You go, girl!"  But it's not, so don't plan on feeling too chipper on the way out of the theatre.

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