02: Permission

Afrooz Ardestani has just done the impossible: scored the winning goal that sends Iran’s women’s national futsal team to the Asian Games final, the first time the country has gone this far. She’s confident, combative, and used to being the best player in the room — on the court, at least no one can tell her no.

Then, at the airport, a passport official does exactly that. Her estranged husband Yasser, a well-known TV host she hasn’t lived with in months, has refused to sign the permission that lets her leave the country — his legal right as her husband, whether or not they’re still together in any real sense. With the team already departing for Malaysia without her, Afrooz has days, not weeks, to find a way out: convince Yasser to relent, push through an emergency divorce, or find some crack in a system built to side with him by default.

What follows is a grinding, bureaucratic siege — courtrooms, lawyers, a husband who knows exactly how to use delay as leverage, and a non existent support system.

Permission is a tense, clear-eyed drama about a woman who has already won on every field that’s actually fair, forced to fight on the one that isn’t — and about how much of a country’s pride in its athletes evaporates the moment that athlete is a woman asking for something a man controls.