'In Iran, anything illegal becomes politically subversive'

The Guardian - "I've always had the tendency to cause trouble," says Maryam Keshavarz. The 36-year-old is speaking down the line from an idyllic-sounding writers' retreat in Portugal, but with the release of Circumstance in the UK this week, the first-time director is not far from controversy.

"It was difficult on both ends to be from two countries that hated each other," she admits. "In Iran it was all 'death to America' and 'you are American, you are a spy!'"

After students stormed the US embassy in Tehran in the 1970s, and took staff hostage, the family's US neighbours violently rejected them.

"Before Iran was this exotic place, but after the hostage-taking we were the enemy. My brothers were beaten up, they threw things at our windows and slashed our tyres," she recalls. "They harassed us constantly. We were ostracised – it was a very, very difficult time."

While some of her brothers (she has seven) responded by hiding their ethnicity, the experience sparked Keshavarz's lifelong attempt to "translate" the two countries to each other. Many of the film's characters were based on relatives or people she met during her time in Iran. The parties Atafeh and Shireen attend reflect her nights out with her cousins – ironically the only time she could do as she pleased as a teenager.

"I grew up in an ultra-religious family. I wasn't allowed to date boys or go out after a certain time. When I made the varsity basketball team as a freshman – which was a big honour – you had to wear shorts, so my dad said: 'You can't play.' Of course I did what I wanted, but I constantly had these huge battles with him. Luckily I had really liberal-minded brothers who helped me a lot.

"My father always had a tight hold on my social life – he was afraid I would be corrupted, but Iran is supposed to be an Islamic state so they thought 'what trouble could she get into?' The craziest parties I have been to and the wildest things I have done were definitely in Iran."

Circumstance, she says, reflects issues in both cultures – and, while set in Iran and scripted in Farsi, its glossiness and pace feel American. The theme of surveillance – which culminates in Atafeh's brother secretly filming the lovers – addresses anxieties around officially sanctioned snooping in the US during the Bush era. But it also illustrates how the state can permeate and sour family life; she first saw this, aged seven, when she spent a year in school in Iran at the height of the Iran-Iraq war.

"Questioning children was very prevalent at the time," she tells me. "They would ask 'do your parents pray?' or 'do you watch foreign movies?'

"I was from the school system in America, where you are taught to always tell the truth no matter what. But [in Iran] you knew you could get your family in trouble so you learned to lie.

"I was very much aware that I had to be careful what I said – and it creates a schism in children, I think. I had cousins who were my age and some of them were," she drops her voice and whispers, mock-dramatically, "the spies for the teachers."

Circumstance's strength is in the exuberance of Atafeh and Shireen, filled with adolescent fantasies of escape (and cringeworthy lad's mag-style fantasies of each other: all matching underwear and high heels) and their rebellious rush to dance, drink and break rules. At times the sensuous hair-flicking and the way the camera lingers on their beauty feels overdone and their interest in liberalism seems to extend only to their right to party.

But the film frames their insistence on following their desires, whatever the consequences, as a powerful form of dissent; Atafeh tells a friend: "Here anything illegal becomes politically subversive."

Set immediately before the protests of the Green movement swept through Iran, the film aims to show where the anger behind the demonstrations came from. "In Iran where the state controls your behaviour … they want you to dress a certain way, and not speak to people of the opposite sex in the street – of course the personal is political," explains Keshavarz, "in a more explicit way than anywhere else."

And while the film's religious figures may be hypocrites and villains, Keshavarz is uncomfortable with anyone reading the film as anti-religion. Rather, she says, it is about how power and politics corrupt religion.

"It is happening in the US too, with the intrusion of the church into politics. It's a global problem. Look at the focus on birth control in America. It's 2012, and we are talking about the pill – are we joking?"

Crucially, she says, it is her religious parents, who refused to impose their beliefs on her, and insisted she think for herself, who gave her the strength to make a film her mother disapproves of. "I think my parents taught me to be a fighter – I just don't think they intended it to come out the way it did."

Circumstance is released in the UK on 24 August