The Circle (Dayereh) is a 2000 film by Iranian independent filmmaker Jafar Panahi that describes the treatment of women in that country. The film is composed of a series of stories that interconnect to describe various incidents in the lives of women, centering around a small group that was recently released from prison, and their attempt to negotiate modern Tehran in a single day. Throughout the film, other women's lives are interspersed to provide insights into the everyday challenges women face under the fundamentalist regime, where even walking alone in the street or smoking a cigarette in public can be considered a crime. Each story intersects, but none of them are complete, leaving the viewer to imagine both the background and the ending. This is a list of film-related events in 2000. ... Jafar Panahi (born July 11, 1960 in Mianeh, Iran) is an internationally-acclaimed independent filmmaker. ... Tehran (also transcribed Teheran) (تهران in Persian), population 9,000,000 (metropolitan: 14,000,000), and a land area of 254 square miles, is the capital of Iran (Persia) and the center of Tehran Province. ... In comparative religion, fundamentalism refers to anti-modernist movements in various religions. ... A cigarette will burn to ash on one end. ...

The film begins in a maternity ward of a hospital, where a mother, Solmaz Gholami, is upset to learn that her daughter has just given birth to a girl, even though the ultrasound indicated that the baby would be a boy. Worrying that her in-laws will force their son to divorce her daughter, she tells another daughter to call her uncles. Ultrasound is sound with a frequency greater than the upper limit of human hearing, approximately 20 kilohertz. ...

At the phone booth, she runs into three prisoners, including Arezou and Nargess, who have just been released. They are trying to come up with money so that they can go to Nargess's home village. The third prisoner is immediately arrested, as she tries to pawn a gold chain, leaving just the two women. Arezou eventually finds enough money to get Nargess a bus ticket, and the two of them separate.

At the bus station, however, Nargess can't get on the bus, because it is being searched, and she is afraid that she will be arrested again. Instead she tries to find another prisoner, Pari, who was also released that day. Pari's father will not let her in the house, however, and just as she leaves, Pari's two brothers appear to "talk" to their sister. She manages to escape, and eventually makes her way to a hospital where she finds Elhan, another former prisoner who has hidden her past and is now a nurse, married to a doctor.

From her conversation with Elhan, we learn that Pari is pregnant, but the father of her baby has been executed, and she has no one to approve her having an abortion. Elhan is too timid to do anything to help her, so Pari is left to wander the streets at night. Without ID, she cannot get into a hotel. At a street corner, she finds a mother trying to abandon her little girl, hoping that she will find a better life with a family. She continues wandering the street, until she is picked up for being alone.

Though she manages to escape, another woman who was picked up is a prostitute, who is taken to prison. She is placed in a cell with other women, and the phone rings outside the metal door. A guard answers and goes to the window, calling for Solmaz Gholami--the grandmother of the baby who was born in the first scene.

Throughout the film, Panahi focuses on the little rules that make life so difficult for Iranian women, such as the ban on smoking in public, or the need to wear a chador under certain circumstances. Though his cast consisted of amateur actresses, he managed to capture the sense of despair that pervades every aspect of their life. A chador (in Persian: چادر Châdor) is an outer garment worn by women; it is one possible way in which a Muslim woman may follow the hijab dress-code. ...

Though The Circle is perhaps the best known of Panahi's works, it was banned in Iran.