BERLIN - Women's roles and the eternal fight to expand their rights in Iranian society get a light, hugely entertaining treatment in Jafar Panahi's "Offsides," a story about girls caught dressing as boys to sneak into a World Cup-qualifying soccer match in Tehran. A far cry from the director's festival winners, "The White Balloon" and "The Circle," Panahi builds small incidents into a bracing comedy that explores the ambiguity and inconsistencies of his country's laws controlling barriers between the sexes.

The film could get wide global exposure, as the themes are universal and the storytelling is winning. Whether it ever gets released in Iran, though, is a real question.

Young girls trying to sneak past stadium check points for soccer matches are so common that soldiers have created an upper-deck holding pen to put offenders before turning them over to the vice squad. Here the girls suffer in agony. Not, you understand, over shame or repercussions of their actions but from hearing the crowd's roar. This only reminds them they are missing the crucial match.

They implore their equally young guards to take a peak at the game inside and perform a play-by-play of the action. The soldier in charge, a country bumpkin overwhelming by the sophistication of these Tehran women, resorts to shouting at everyone including his own men.

He tries to defend the country's ludicrous rules governing the sexes to one particularly cunning girl. When forced to admit the rules don't seem to apply to foreign women, she exclaims, "So my problem is I was born in Iran?"

High point is another girl's trip to the men's room - there are no women's rooms - under guard. This is a gem of comic action and cross-purposes.