Iranian director Jafar Panahi has a keen appreciation for the contradictions of power. He once spent 10 hours chained to a bench at JFK airport, detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He was only there on a stopover between Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. And this was five months before the events of September 11, 2001.

The irony is that Mr. Panahi, 46, is one of the most outspoken artists working in Iran. Two of his films, “The Circle” (2000) and “Crimson Gold” (2003) were officially banned. And his latest project, “Offside” — which opens next Friday in New York — had to be shot on the sly. The movie is a sympathetic account of a group of female soccer fans who disguise themselves in an effort to attend a World Cup preliminary match, despite the fact that entry to such public sporting events has been forbidden to women since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

So when news came that Mr. Panahi was suddenly unable to enter the United States to promote his film earlier this month, the first thought was he’d been denied entry. But that was not the case.

“I tried to get a visa while I was in Paris, but I just didn’t have enough time,” the filmmaker said via translator from Mar del Plata, Argentina, where he was attending a film festival.

Not long ago, in fact, he was in Los Angeles. “And I got the red carpet treatment at the airport, with a police escort!”

There’s another sort of police escort in “Offside.” But, tellingly, Mr. Panahi finds the humane, humorous side of social oppression. The trio of pimple-faced guards assigned to watch over a corral of six high school and college-aged women who have been detained at the soccer stadium are bored and susceptible to feminine wiles. As a long afternoon progresses into night, and the actual Iran-Bahrain World Cup qualifying match proceeds just out of view, a kind of collective anarchy begins to assert itself. Everyone gets so swept up into the drama of the game that they forget their situation; they are simply joyous, patriotic sports fanatics. Instead of the beatings and imprisonment faced by many women in the “white scarf” movement, as they call themselves, the resolution is much sweeter.

“The movie was made at a particular time when there was a transition going on in the country,” Mr. Panahi said, remarking on the period just before the elections that brought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into power. “It was a period of transition that allowed us to work in circumstances that aren’t always available.”

Mr. Panahi proved amazingly resourceful. Informed he was no longer allowed to make movies in Iran without script approval, he submitted a fake screenplay to Iran’s Ministry of Guidance, which oversees film production. He also used someone else’s name. And to shoot at the stadium in Tehran, he employed a digital camera. “A 35 mm camera would be too conspicuous,” he said. “I was able to blend in with the cameras of the journalists and the other people who were covering the game.”

It no doubt helped as well that Mr. Panahi only used nonprofessional actors who all made their screen debuts. The naturalistic performances, combined with the real-time events of the soccer match, give “Offside” its documentary realism. As the filmmaker notes, had the climactic results of the bout turned out differently, so too would have the story — which was inspired when his own teenage daughter was turned away from a match.

Though his film won the Silver Bear at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival, it has only been screened selectively in Iran. His audience there exists on the bootleg DVD market. But, as he observes, there has always been censorship in Iran regardless of the regime. He said American involvement in Iraq and intimations of military action against Iran have threatened to make things worse for himself and his peers, who constantly recalibrate their tactics for artistic survival. “Despite those measures,” he said, “we manage to make our own films.”