The Assmanns of Heidelberg, Germany, are a family that plays soccer and make films together.
Those twin passions unfold in dramatic fashion in Football Under Cover, an 86-minute documentary that is playing at the RiverRun International Film Festival.
The film has been shown at more than 30 film festivals, including Tribeca, the Berlin International Film Festival and Hot Docs in Toronto. It is one of the entries in RiverRun's documentary competition.
The film is a behind-the-scenes look at what it took to stage a soccer match between a women's club team in Berlin and the Iranian women's national team, which had never played against foreign competition.
The idea was hatched in Berlin in 2005 when David Assmann and his sisters -- Marlene, Valerie and Corinna -- met Iranian director Ayat Najafi at a film competition. The Assmanns had recently completed a short film on a soccer club in Berlin.
The club, Al Dersimspor, was a tightly knit group of women of various ethnic backgrounds. The Assmann sisters, who picked up soccer in 1990 in the wake of Germany's win in the World Cup, played on the club.
In Berlin, Najafi and the Assmanns talked soccer.
"We asked him about women's soccer in Iran," said David Assmann, who accompanied his sister Corinna Assmann to RiverRun.
When Najafi told them about the newly formed Iranian women's team, Marlene Assmann told her siblings: "OK. That's a project. Let's go to Tehran."
From the beginning, the Assmanns wanted to make a documentary about the game. They figured that they could get financing to film the project easier than they could find financing to simply put on a soccer match. They also said they thought that a film could shine a light on what must be one of the world's most overlooked communities of footballers -- women living in a Islamic fundamentalist state.
"I didn't know too much about Iran at that point," Corinna Assmann said. "I thought it would be an easy film to make."
Instead, the filmmakers ran into several brick walls thrown up by the conservative Iranian government, which has a history of suppressing the rights of women. Indeed, in Iran, women aren't allowed to go to a stadium and watch men play soccer.
While waiting to get permission to play the game, Najafi, working with an Iranian film crew, shot footage of the Iranian players.
One player, Niloofar Bassir, dressed as a man so that she could go outside and practice dribbling while a cameraman surreptitiously filmed from behind bushes.
Months after the film crew first approached the Iranians, the game was set. About 2,000 women filed into the stadium and began cheering, singing and clapping, as if they were uncorking a thousand years of bottled emotions.
No men were allowed in the match, which meant that David Assmann could not witness the pivotal moment of a documentary that he helped conceive.
The footage of the game was filmed by German and Iranian women.
Iranian soccer officials told Bassir just before the match that she could not play because her body was too slight.
The Assmanns believe that the Iranians were uncomfortable with Bassir's level of interest in the film.
"Like so many things in Iran, we can only speculate," David Assmann said.
Although the film has not been shown publicly in Iran, most of the players on the team have seen it and like it, the Assmanns say.
"We wanted to express the power of soccer," Corinna Assmann said.
■ Lisa O'Donnell can be reached at 727-7420 or at lodonnell@wsjournal.com.
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