Iranian filmmaker Ghasideh Golmakani world-premiered her feature debut, the German-Iranian co-production Head to Head, in the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival. Built around a film-within-a-film, it begins with a simple inversion: acclaimed Iranian director Bahar (Mehrnoosh Satari) requires her male actors to wear headscarves and female clothing while recreating gender-swapped scenes from Iranian cinema. As gender inversion is the core of her experiment, she insists that the cast wear these garments even when the cameras stop rolling and they are off the set. The performers initially comply, lured by the prospect of festival exposure, international careers, or even visas, but the heat, the physical restrictions these clothes imply and the perceived assault on the actors’ masculinity soon provoke resistance. Thus, Bahar’s experiment exposes how quickly men come to regard as humiliation the clothing and behavioural rules routinely imposed on women. When one actor, the rebellious Sina (Saeed Naderi), objects, she coolly reminds him that the production is merely recreating entirely normal situations.

The premise recalls the gender reversal of Riad Sattouf’s Jacky in the Kingdom of Women, but Golmakani does not construct an inverted theocratic fantasy. Head to Head stays within a recognisable realist register, allowing its provocation to generate slightly absurd comic undertones rather than expanding into broad satire. The joke is embedded in the working conditions, the participants’ wounded vanity and the negotiations happening on set, its political impact resulting from the way a hierarchy considered to be ordinary suddenly becomes visible once the bodies subjected to it are male. Golmakani’s target is double. The film challenges the patriarchal regulation of women in Iranian society while scrutinising how cinema reproduces that order through representation. Bahar may control her set, but her authority remains conditional.

Around its midpoint, officials intervene and disrupt the clandestine and underground production. As Bahar, Sina, Bahar’s cameraman Ebi (Ebrahim Azizi) and another actor from the cast (Amir Hajimohammadi) who almost stays completely silent throughout the film have to flee the set, Head to Head takes a turn to become an existential road movie – a shift which recalls the mobile structure of Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (lensed by the same DoP, Amin Jafari), although Golmakani approaches the journey through the perspective of a female filmmaker and her predicament as an artist and a woman in Iran. Bahar’s dual position as protagonist and director also creates a self-reflexive parallel. Filmmaking becomes both the subject of resistance and the precarious means through which resistance can be articulated.

While less biting and satirical than Panahi's recent outing, Golmakani’s work brings a uniquely meta-textual female point of view which comes to a head in the final act, where Bahar’s backstory is revealed. It turns out she served a prison sentence for refusing to wear the hijab, which she visibly detests even when everyone around her is endangered by her choice. Bahar, stubborn to a fault, flirts so relentlessly with the risk of alienating her colleagues and cast completely that she gets dangerously close to anti-heroine territory, until her hidden traumas are brought to light, that is, as they reframe her rigid stance as a political necessity forged in the fires of normalised societal misogyny.

Head to Head was produced by Ghasideh Golmakani, with David M Lorenz serving as associate producer. DreamLab Films handles the international sales.