I am not much of a fan of women’s soccer, so goodness knows how I ended up watching an 85-minute documentary about a match between Iran’s national women’s team (did you even know such a thing existed?) and a local Berlin girls’ squad.

You can still catch “Football Under Cover” if you happen to be in Berlin for the Film Festival this week. It tells the true story of the match which took place in Tehran in April 2006 and the onerous preparations for it.

Even an amateur like me can see it was not a great match. For starters, it lacked pace. No wonder. The sturdily-built young women could barely move for all their clothes: long smocks over tracksuit bottoms and headscarves which I would guess obstructed vision.

But this misses the point. The film is not about football, it is about power.

The players show a gritty determination to overcome bureaucratic barriers to get the match played in the first place, and the all-female crowd also shows defiance.

The women go wild, cheering, whistling, shouting and jumping up and down before the sinister presence of black-robed female “guardians” who order the crowd to act in a more dignified way.

The film dwells mostly on the Berlin team’s frustrating preparations and their reservations about going, but it is an Iranian player who steals the show.

Niloofar, who has dressed as a boy to train without a headscarf, has posters of David Beckham plastered over her bedroom and even dreams about him. “Luckily, he spoke Farsi in my dream,” she giggles.

PHOTO: Film still from http://flyingmoon.com/german/football_d.html