title: Spencer Hastings

text: Spencer and the rest of the Liars strongly begin to believe that Ian was Alison's murderer and he realizes that Spencer knows about his relationship with Alison. The two have a tense relationship and Ian successfully convinces the Hastings family that Spencer's erratic behavior is due to jealousy of him and Melissa. Spencer sends anonymous text messages to Ian, threatening to expose him. When Spencer and Melissa get into a car accident, Spencer goes back to the church to get Melissa's phone, where Ian is waiting. He reveals that he knows Spencer is behind the messages and attempts to kill her but he is then attacked by a mysterious figure, who then kills Ian. The rest of the Liars join Spencer and call the police but when the police arrive, Ian's body is gone.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: A flashback reveals that Spencer and Alison got into a major argument on the night of her disappearance, suggesting Spencer is also a suspect in Alison's murder.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: The police do not believe the Liars' version of events and believe Ian has gone missing. Spencer learns that someone has been texting Melissa from Ian's phone, pretending that he is still alive. Spencer is concerned for Melissa, especially after her miscarriage, but Melissa is distrustful of Spencer. The two eventually reconcile after they discover Ian's body and Melissa finally accepts that he is dead.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: Spencer and Toby are still dating in season 2. While doing yard work for the Hastings, Toby digs up Spencer's old field hockey stick which she gave to Alison before she died. Spencer's father, Peter, sees this and quickly takes the stick, and later burns it. Spencer becomes suspicious and after doing some further investigating, she reads Alison's autopsy results and finds that she was struck in the head with an object similar to a field hockey stick. She discovers that Peter did something illegal for the DiLaurentis family and worries that her father covered up her involvement in Alison's murder.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: After "A" sends a threatening message about Toby, Spencer decides that the best way to keep Toby safe is to break up with him despite his declaration of love for her. Spencer tries to remain friends with him but he rebuffs her attempts.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: Spencer becomes suspicious of Jason DiLaurentis, especially when she and Emily break into his shed and find pictures of Aria. In episode 19, she discovers Peter had an affair with Jessica DiLaurentis and Jason is her half-brother. The reveal divides their family and a distraught Spencer rekindles her romance with Wren as a distraction.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: Spencer continues to investigate A and thinks the Black Swan from the episode "UnmAsked" is A. In the season finale, she discovers A's lair and learns that Mona is A. She is attacked by Mona and they get into a struggle in which Spencer accidentally pushes Mona off of a cliff, almost killing her. The police arrive alongside Toby, who tells Spencer that he still loves her. The season ends with the two reconciled.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: Summer has passed since the unveiling of A but Spencer is determined to uncover the Black Swan, whom she believes is another A still working with Mona. She eventually discovers it was Melissa, who claims that she was blackmailed into showing up at the masked ball. Spencer decides to believe her, but is still suspicious. Meanwhile, she and Toby grow closer and the two eventually have sex for the first time. However, Spencer begins to suspect that Toby is not on their side. When Hanna finds the key to "A"'s new lair and gives it to Spencer, Spencer sets a trap for Toby. She catches him trying to steal it while wearing A's signature jacket, proving he is a member of the A-Team, conspirators who are aligned with A. She breaks up with him, but doesn't tell her friends why.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: Spencer gives the key to a private investigator and gives him a picture of Toby and her, before ripping it in half. She tells the private investigator to follow Toby. After breaking up with Toby, Spencer begins to withdraw from her friends, and becomes emotionally unstable. She becomes obsessed with finding A and the mysterious person in the red coat. In the episode "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" she follows Mona into the woods and discovers what appears to be Toby's dead body. Spencer attempts to chase Mona but gets lost in the woods. In the morning, she is found by a hiker in a catatonic state and is admitted to the Radley Sanitarium. Mona visits her in the sanitarium and offers to let Spencer join the A-Team. In the episode "I'm Your Puppet," Spencer accepts her offer.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: In the Season 3 finale "A Dangerous GAme", Spencer comes up with a plan to trap the Red Coat and reveals to the Liars that she is working for the A-Team as a double agent. Toby contacts Spencer, revealing that he is alive. He explains that he joined the A-Team to protect her and the two make up and have sex. As part of the plan, Spencer hosts a party at a lodge where the girls are supposed to meet the Red Coat, when an unknown figure starts a fire, trapping Aria, Hanna, Emily, and Mona in the burning house. Toby leads Spencer into the woods to see who the Red Coat is. Spencer sees a helicopter land in the woods and the Red Coat step off. Spencer catches a glimpse of her face and believes to have seen Alison. The Red Coat rescues the Liars from the burning house and Hanna and Mona also believe to have seen Alison. The group drives back to Rosewood and see Wilden's car dug up from the lake. All of them, including Mona, get a text from A.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: Spencer and her friends continue to be tormented by A. Ashley Marin is arrested for Wilden's murder and Spencer's mother Veronica Hastings is her defense attorney. Spencer gives Hanna and her mother emotional support in the lead up to the trial. She also supports Toby in finding out the truth about his mother even though she does not approve of him trusting A for clues.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: In the midseason finale, Spencer and her friends go to Ravenswood after receiving a puzzling clue from A. There, she and her friends discover that there are two Red Coats. One is revealed to be CeCe Drake and Spencer chases the other Red Coat, who leads her to A's apartment. Spencer and the others search the apartment and deduce the owner is a male. In the episode "Grave New World" the Liars learn that A believe Alison will be returning to Ravenswood on the night of the graveyard party. While looking for Alison, the Liars becomes separated while searching an old house. Spencer comes across A and tries to unmask him but is knocked out. It is later revealed that Ezra is the male A. Giving up on their search, the Liars return Spencer's car and discover her tires are slashed. Ezra suddenly arrives and give them a ride home. Back at Spencer's, the Liars see the Red Coat and follow her into Spencer's garden. The Red Coat is revealed to be Alison, who is not dead.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: Following this, Spencer tries even harder to work out who A is in order to make it safe for Alison to come home. Overwhelmed by both her investigation and school work, she begins abusing amphetamines. It is revealed that she had abused amphetamines before and was addicted to them the summer prior to Ali's disappearance. This leads her to begin to question her own role in the death of the girl in Ali's grave that night. She eventually ends up being sent to rehab by her parents, and upon getting out, she meets Alison in New York. Alison assures her that while they did argue on the night of her disappearance, Spencer went back to sleep and had nothing to do with the murder.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: With Alison's return, Spencer has a hard time getting used Alison's domineering attitutde. Spencer struggles with the idea of her father being the killer of Jessica DiLaurentis. Spencer's rivalry with her sister Melissa is put to and end when Melissa reveals that she's the one who buried Bethany Young, in order to protect Spencer. Later, Spencer is arrested for Bethany's murder; however, she was released shortly after when the P.D. gets convinced that Alison is the one who is really responsible. Toby becomes a cop, which makes his relationship with Spencer tough, since Spencer wants him to share all the information the police has, but Toby starts to prefers to keep quiet. The love drought leads Spencer to other men — Jonny and Colin. Spencer and Melissa's relationship gets awkward again when Melissa lies to Spencer. In the season finale, Spencer and the others are arrested as accomplices to Mona's murder; however, on the way to prison, their van is hijacked by "A." and they get taken to A's 'DollHouse'


title: Spencer Hastings

text: In the aftermath of the Liars' abduction orchestrated by "A," Spencer's old addiction surfaces again in order to relieve stress. A sleep disorder also recur due to the torture she had faced while being trapped in A'S Dollhouse, and it heavily intensifies the addiction, making Spencer ask for help from Dean, and old counselor, and Sabrina, the new-in-charge at the Brew who gives Spencer brownies with marijuana. Spencer starts to investigate who's behind the Carissimi Group and who Charles is. Meanwhile, her relationship with Toby remains untouchable. In the mid-season finale, it is revealed that CeCe Drake is "A," and the Liars finally gets peace.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: Afterwards, Spencer moves to Georgetown in order to get involved with a future political career in Washington, D.C., and ends up in a lobbyist career. She returns to Rosewood five years later at Alison's request, and also to depose on Charlotte's release from psychological hospital. It is revealed that during the five last years she and Toby broke up because of the distance and the different future plans, and, following, she started a thrilling flirt with Caleb Rivers. Having to stay in Rosewood after Charlotte was murdered, she starts working on her mother's election campaign for Senate, while the daughter of the other candidate is Yvonne Phillips, Toby's current girlfriend. Spencer finds out that Charlotte was killed in a copycat manner off a murder she wrote an essay about in college, leading her to start thinking that the police could blame her for Charlotte's death.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: A new stalker, now entitled as "A.D.", surfaces, resulting in tension. When a document about Yvonne's mother leaks and Caleb takes the blame, Spencer goes crazy, and Toby fights with him. Spencer, along with the other Liars, Caleb, Mona and Toby, elaborate a plan to take "A.D." down, but everything goes down when the stalker kidnaps Hanna.


title: Spencer Hastings

text: In "The Darkest Knight", Spencer is shot by Uber A during the attack by Jenna and Noel. As Jenna is preparing to shoot her again, out of revenge for her and Charlotte, Mary Drake comes in and knocks Jenna out. Mary then cradles Spencer's body and reveals that she is indeed Spencer's mother, making Spencer the biological sister of Cece Drake. In season 7b, Spencer and the other liars receive a big board game called "Liar's Lament", and in the episode "These Boots Are Made For Stalking", it is revealed that Spencer is Mary Drake's second child. In the last half of the last episode, we find out that Spencer was locked up inside a "cell". While the "Spencer", who we saw kissing Toby and then having sex with, was actually Alex Drake, her twin sister, also known as A.D.. Alex, jealous of Spencer, wanted to have everything she never had, a family, friends, and even Toby, who she had "fallen in love with", so she kidnapped the real Spencer, pretending to be her all the time. And through the flashbacks, we are shown when Alex Drake impersonates her sister. It was Alex, not Spencer, who was with Hanna when Hanna was kidnapped. In the flashbacks, we are shown some examples of when Alex has "played" Spencer. Alex was the one who asked Toby for "one last kiss, just to say goodbye" in "The DArkest Knight". Spencer and Ezra, who had been kidnapped as well, escaped the cell, but soon were trapped with Alex. Spencer and Alex fought until the Liars plus Toby and Caleb found them. Both pleading to be the "real" Spencer, Toby figures out who the real Spencer is by asking what is her favorite poem in the book she gave him in "The DArkest Knight". The real Spencer responds with the correct response and Alex is arrested along with Mary Drake. Spencer and Toby resume their relationship and start dating again at the end of the series.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The Oklahoma–Texas football rivalry is a college football rivalry game between border rivals Oklahoma and Texas. The two teams first played each other in 1900, and the rivalry has been renewed annually and uninterrupted since 1929 for a total of 118 games as of 2022. The rivalry is commonly referred to as the Red River Shootout, or alternatively the Red River Rivalry, or the Red River Showdown. The "Red River" in the name refers to the body of water that runs along much of the border between the states of Texas and Oklahoma.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The game has been played on the second Saturday in October since 1934 (with the exception of select years when it was held on the first Saturday). Since 1932, the game's site has been the Cotton Bowl inside Fair Park in Dallas. The winner of the regular-season matchup receives the Golden Hat, which is a gold ten-gallon hat, formerly of bronze. The trophy is kept by the winning school's athletic department until the next year.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The first game in the series was played in 1900, when Oklahoma was still a territory. The game was formerly called the Red River Shootout. For the 100th game in 2005, sponsored by SBC Communications, the game was officially renamed the SBC Red River Rivalry, with the word "Rivalry" replacing "Shootout" out of a desire not to convey an attitude of condoning gun violence. The following year, with SBC's merger with AT&T Corporation, the game was renamed the AT&T Red River Rivalry. In 2014, it became the AT&T Red River Showdown. The term Red River Shootout or Red River Showdown is also applied to meetings between the two schools in sports other than football. During a Q&A session with DeLoss Dodds (the Athletic Director of UT) during the Big 12 restructuring and chaos that ensued thereafter, Dodds stated in an interview, "That game – the rivalry game for us has always been Oklahoma. The A&M game's been a great game and all of that. And we may play 'em. But it's not something that we have to do. I think the Oklahoma game is something we have to do."


title: Red River Showdown

text: Since 1936, the first year of the AP Poll, at least one of the teams has come into the game ranked 70 times, including every one of the last 19 meetings, a streak which ended in 2022 when both teams came into the game unranked and 3–2. Texas leads the overall series . In 2005, "The Dallas Morning News" asked the 119 Division 1A football coaches to identify the top rivalry game in college football. The Red River Rivalry ranked third, behind only Michigan–Ohio State and Army–Navy.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The first meeting between Oklahoma and Texas football teams occurred in 1900, before either team had acquired their current nickname. At that time, the Texas team was typically called "Varsity". The write-up in the "Austin American-Statesman" article referred to the game as a "practice game". The paper reported:


title: Red River Showdown

text: The game of football yesterday afternoon at the Varsity athletic field was an interesting contrast, notwithstanding the rather one-sided score of 28–2 in favor of the Varsity.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The Oklahoma men played a very good game, but they had weak points and the Varsity men found this out, and proceeded to take advantage of them. For instance, the visitors' tackles and ends were weak, and the Varsity men made most of their gains through these men. Their guards and center, though, were stiff enough, and the Varsity's attack at these points never netted large gains, and were frequently futile.


title: Red River Showdown

text: While Oklahoma should be given credit for the stiffness of her center trio, the fact that the Varsity backs made but small headway at these points is partly due to the Varsity backs themselves. They had not the life and dash that is necessary to successful line plunging, and they failed to heed Coach Thompson's oft repeated admonition to hit the line low and with speed, and the consequence was that when they got to the line they did not have the necessary momentum to plunge on through.


title: Red River Showdown

text: This was the case, notwithstanding the fact that the men are coached to play a good distance behind the line, so that they can get up speed by the time they reach it.


title: Red River Showdown

text: In the 1950 rivalry game, Billy Vessels scored on an 11-yard run late in the contest and Texas native Jim Weatherall kicked the extra point to give Oklahoma a narrow 14–13 win.


title: Red River Showdown

text: In 1958, Texas defeated Oklahoma by one point, breaking the University of Oklahoma's series dominance of the 1950s. The game was notable in that Texas Longhorns head coach Darrell Royal had 10 years earlier been the quarterback for the Oklahoma Sooners. Royal defeated his former coach and mentor Bud Wilkinson in the game. Wilkinson would lose to Texas the next five years before retiring in 1963.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The 1963 game featured No. 1 Oklahoma versus No. 2 Texas, the seventh regular season No. 1 versus No. 2 game (eighth, overall) in the history of the AP Poll. Texas won the game, took the No. 1 ranking and kept it for the rest of the season, winning its first national championship.


title: Red River Showdown

text: In 1972, Oklahoma spied on Texas' practices, allowing them to block a quick kick the Longhorns had secretly been working on en route to a victory.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The 1976 rivalry game was overshadowed by allegations by Texas coach Darrell Royal that Oklahoma had been spying on his practices. The claim was later confirmed in OU Coach Barry Switzer's book, "Bootlegger's Boy". Royal and Switzer (who was 3–0 against Texas as a head coach coming into this game) were involved in a serious feud at the time. The 1976 game was attended by U.S. President Gerald Ford. Ford made an appearance with Royal and Switzer before the game. Switzer and Royal both spoke to Ford but not to each other. The game ended in a 6–6 tie. It was Royal's final Red River Shootout.


title: Red River Showdown

text: In the 1977 game, Texas lost both their starting and backup quarterbacks in the first half. Yet, behind the power running of eventual Heisman Trophy winner Earl Campbell, a strong defense, and the unheralded composure of third-string-quarterback Randy McEachern, the Horns prevailed 13–6.


title: Red River Showdown

text: In a rain-soaked 1984 game, Texas entered the game ranked No. 1, Oklahoma No. 3 (No. 2 in some polls). University of Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer wore a ballcap during the game that read "Beat Texas." This game also marked the only time that future University of Texas at Austin head coach Mack Brown participated in the Red River Shootout not as a Texas Longhorn (Brown was OU's offensive coordinator). Texas jumped to a 10–0 halftime lead but OU rallied to lead 15–12 in the game's closing seconds. With 10 seconds remaining, trailing by 3, Texas was driving and was within field goal range but decided to take one more shot at the end zone. Texas quarterback (and future North Texas head coach) Todd Dodge appeared (in replays) to be intercepted in the end zone by OU's Keith Stanberry, but the officials ruled it incomplete. Texas's Jeff Ward subsequently kicked a field goal and the game ended in a 15–15 tie.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The first Big 12 Conference overtime game, the 1996 meeting featured a John Blake squad under the direction of freshman quarterback Justin Fuente. The game ended Oklahoma 30–Texas 27 after a come from behind victory in the final seven minutes. Jarrail Jackson returned a punt 51 yards for a touchdown, then Fuente completed a 2-point conversion pass to Stephen Alexander to cut the lead to 24–21. The Sooners forced the Longhorns to punt, and drove to the Texas 28. Jeremy Alexander kicked a 44-yard field goal to tie the game at 24.


title: Red River Showdown

text: In overtime, Texas was forced to settle for a 43-yard Phil Dawson field goal, after losing 1 yard on three plays. Lining up at the Texas 25, James Allen broke a ten-yard run, carried for two and three yards, then caught an 8-yard screen pass from Fuente on 3rd and 5 from the 10. On the next play, Allen took a pitch from Fuente two yards into the endzone, doing what he was unable to do two years before.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The 2000 game was marked by rain and 49-degree weather, but it ended up being noted for bringing the most lopsided margin of victory in the history of the match-up (at that time; Oklahoma would top its feat three years later). Oklahoma came into the game ranked 10th, with Texas ranked 11th. This was the highest combined rankings of the teams since 1984. The Sooners got up to a 42-point lead before Texas scored. Oklahoma won the game 63–14. OU also held Texas to minus-7 yards rushing, an all-time regular-season low for the Longhorns.


title: Red River Showdown

text: Longhorn coach Mack Brown said "It wasn't even a game because we did not play in the first half." Sooner coach Bob Stoops said, "This was a total team victory, everybody made plays. ...We had a little bit of everything." Stoops improved his record vs the Longhorns to 1 win, 1 loss as a result of the game. OU President David Boren cancelled classes the following Monday on account of inclement weather: "It was snowing touchdowns in Dallas."


title: Red River Showdown

text: Sooner running back Quentin Griffin scored six touchdowns, tying the all-time NCAA record for most rushing touchdowns in a game. Oklahoma went on to an undefeated season, and won the 2000 National Championship.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The 2001 game, which ended Oklahoma 14–Texas 3, was a classic defensive struggle that was notable for a play made late in the 4th quarter.


title: Red River Showdown

text: Both the Sooners' and the Longhorns' defenses were outstanding, holding their counterparts to less than 100 yards rushing for the entire game. When either offense could muster any momentum, they were often let down by their kicker-OU's Tim Duncan missed two field goals and UT's Dusty Mangum had one blocked.


title: Red River Showdown

text: OU led 7–3 at the half on a Quentin Griffin 2-yard touchdown in the second quarter. That score held until late in the fourth quarter.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The Sooners got the ball with just over eight minutes to play on their own 20-yard line, and put together a 12-play, 53-yard drive that took them all the way to the Texas 27-yard line. Facing a 4th & 16, OU sent out Tim Duncan for what appeared to be a 44-yard FG attempt. Instead, Duncan sent a pooch punt deep into the Texas zone, which caught UT's Nathan Vasher off guard. Confused, Vasher caught the ball at his own 3-yard line and was immediately downed.


title: Red River Showdown

text: Down 7–3, Texas had 2:06 to drive 97 yards on the stiff Sooner defense. On first down, Texas quarterback Chris Simms' pass was deflected by OU safety Roy Williams, who had blitzed and literally leapt over the blocker, Brett Robin, to collide with Simms at the moment he released the ball. The ball landed right in Oklahoma linebacker Teddy Lehman's hands, who walked into the endzone for a touchdown. The play happened so fast, many fans did not know exactly what had happened. The play by Roy Williams is often called "The Superman Play" because of the way that Williams resembled Superman flying through the air with his arms stretched out at Chris Simms when he hit him. Duncan's extra point sealed the 14–3 OU victory.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The 2005 game, which ended Texas 45–Oklahoma 12, was the 100th meeting in the series and a special logo was created to commemorate the event. The game logo included both team logos, the logo of the sponsor for that game, SBC communications, the number 100, a football, and a star. Prior to the game, the Longhorns were ranked 2nd by the Associated Press, and the Sooners were unranked for the first time since 1999, which was also Texas's last victory over OU.


title: Red River Showdown

text: By breaking the string of five consecutive losses to Oklahoma, Longhorn coach Mack Brown preserved the Longhorns's National Championship hopes. With the win, Texas tied its largest margin of victory in the series. Freshman running back Jamaal Charles set a record for rushing yards by a Texas freshman in the series. With his 80-yard scamper, Charles also had the longest touchdown from scrimmage by a Texas running back in the series.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The game also featured one of the most violent hits in the series history, when Texas DE, Brian Robison, blindsided Oklahoma quarterback, Rhett Bomar, in the 4th quarter, causing a fumble and ensuing touchdown by Longhorn tackle, Rodrique Wright.


title: Red River Showdown

text: As had occurred the two seasons prior, the road to the National Championship game went through Dallas. Oklahoma left the game with a 1–1 conference record and a 2–3 record overall, finishing with a 6–2 conference and 8–4 overall record, including a victory in the Holiday Bowl. The Longhorns improved to 5–0 overall, 2–0 in the Big 12 on their way to an 8–0 conference, 13–0 overall record, including a victory in the Rose Bowl and the 2005 football National Championship.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The 2007 match-up between Oklahoma and Texas was predicted to be the No. 3 game to watch in 2007 by SI.com's "Top 20 Games To Watch In 2007" list, and it did not disappoint. The game was close from start to finish as the Sooners struck first with a quick touchdown pass to TE Jermaine Gresham. QB Colt McCoy's passing attack responded quickly to tie the game for the 'Horns, then again to take a lead, particularly off the efforts of TE Jermichael Finley. The Sooners were able to tie the score going into the half off of another Sam Bradford-to-Jermaine Gresham connection. The Longhorns were able to get into the red zone at the beginning of the second half, but a costly fumble by RB Jamaal Charles at the 5-yard line cut short the momentum. A few series later, RB DeMarco Murray ripped off a 65-yard TD run to give the Sooners a 21–14 lead. The 'Horns did not take this lying down, as they were able to score soon thereafter. The Oklahoma passing attack scored the final touchdown of the game with about ten minutes left to play, on a 35-yard touchdown pass to WR Malcolm Kelly from Bradford. The 'Horns threatened twice in the final waning minutes, as it took a CB Reggie Smith interception and defensive play against star WR Limas Sweed to secure the win for Oklahoma.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The 2008 Meeting of the Red River Rivalry ended Texas 45, Oklahoma 35. Oklahoma ranked No. 1 in the nation and Texas was ranked No. 5. Both were 5–0 coming into the game. In the first quarter, Bradford completed a 5-yard touchdown pass to Manuel Johnson. The Sooners led 7–0. With 6:41 left in the first quarter, Texas answered with a Hunter Lawrence 26-yard field goal. OU scored 2 touchdowns in the second quarter and Texas scored two touchdowns and a field goal including a 96-yard kickoff return by Jordan Shipley. The score at the half was 21–20 OU.


title: Red River Showdown

text: Texas ended up winning this 103rd meeting, 45–35. At the time, it was the highest scoring event in the history of rivalry (the 2021 game now holds that record, with Oklahoma beating Texas, 55-48), and it was seen by the most fans, a record 92,182.<ref name="TX/ou recap"></ref>


title: Red River Showdown

text: In 2009, Texas won a low scoring game, 16–13. Texas scored one touchdown and three field goals, while OU scored one touchdown and only two field goals. Oklahoma quarterback Sam Bradford had injured his shoulder earlier in the year when playing the BYU Cougars, at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, TX. Despite this injury, Bradford started in the 2009 Red River Rivalry confident that his shoulder was healed. However, early in the first quarter a sack by Aaron Williams re-aggravated his injury and forced him out of the game, ending his season and making the Texas game his final college game. Texas quarterback Colt McCoy threw for 127 yards, while the team combined for 142 rushing yards. OU's replacement quarterback, Landry Jones, replaced Bradford and threw for 250 yards of passing with 2 interceptions. The most notable statistic of the game was that the Sooners were held to minus 16 yards of rushing by the Longhorn defense.


title: Red River Showdown

text: In 2012, the 107th meeting of the Longhorns and Sooners, Oklahoma narrowly edged Texas 63 – 21. It appeared that the game would have a very different feel than the 2011 meeting after OU scored its first touchdown and Quandre Diggs of Texas recovered a blocked PAT and ran the distance of the field to score a 2-point conversion. This game had moments that will add to the history of this rivalry: Texas' Damien Williams broke free for a 95-yard touchdown run for the longest rush in Red River Rivalry history. Trey Millard had a 73-yard reception, the longest pass play by an OU player in Red River Rivalry history, surpassing Buddy Leake's 65-yarder in 1953. The Sooners lead the Longhorns most of this game, and Oklahoma ended up with a 677–289 advantage in total yardage and it is third 60+ point Red River scoring effort in Bob Stoops' tenure.


title: Red River Showdown

text: In 2013, Texas came onto the field in Dallas with head coach Mack Brown on the hot seat. Former Longhorn great Earl Campbell had publicly stated two weeks earlier that Mack Brown was "too old" to continue coaching. Brown's players rallied behind their beleaguered coach, however, and Texas won the Red River Rivalry game for the first time since 2009. Texas walked in as major underdogs, in part due to a 1–2 start with an upset loss at BYU and a loss to No. 25 Ole Miss. The game was notable in part because a defensive lineman from each team scored a touchdown on an interception return. In addition, Colt McCoy's brother Case lead the Longhorns to victory, becoming the first quarterback to lead the team to victory since his brother accomplished this feat in 2009.


title: Red River Showdown

text: In 2014, the game was played following both teams' losses the prior weekend. Oklahoma had fallen to No. 11 in the rankings following its loss to No. 25 TCU, with a 4–1 record (1–1 Big 12), whereas Texas had fallen to a 2–3 record after losing to No. 7 Baylor, (also 1–1 Big 12). Oklahoma's offense had been explosive all five games prior, and its defense had been equally solid. With this being said, Texas' defense was able to prevent an Oklahoma offensive touchdown for the entire first half, and held the Sooners to under 30 total first-half yards, while the Texas Offense gained over 240 yards. In each game of the 2014 season, every team that had led the opposition by more than 200 yards gained was 57–0. However, another perfect record had been on the line, as Oklahoma's first kick return was returned for a touchdown, and on Texas' first second-quarter possession, Oklahoma's defense forced an interception that was returned for a touchdown, and in every Oklahoma game where that occurred, Oklahoma won (8–0). Oklahoma was able to widen the halftime score of 17–13 to 31–13 after a pair of offensive touchdowns, but Texas skillfully scored two late touchdowns of their own, failing on the second two-point conversion. Oklahoma was then able to take several minutes off the clock, and Texas was unable to score on its final possession, ending the game 31–26 in favor of Oklahoma.


title: Red River Showdown

text: In 2015, Oklahoma walked into Dallas No. 10 in the country with a high-octane Air Raid offense while Texas was 14 after a string of painful losses due to special teams (Cal 45–44, missed PAT, Oklahoma State, 30–27 mishandled snap on punt setting up FG) and blowout losses (Notre Dame, 38–3, TCU, 50–7) with Charlie Strong's job already being in question in his second year. The Longhorns' running game pumped out 313 yards, which featured D'Onta Foreman breaking free for an 81-yard rush to set up a TD to put Texas in command 24–10 while the young Texas defense held OU to 67 yards rushing, and sacking OU quarterback Baker Mayfield multiple times as Texas outgunned Oklahoma 24–17, giving Strong his first signature win.


title: Red River Showdown

text: In 2018, Texas came into Dallas ranked No. 19 facing the undefeated No. 7 Oklahoma Sooners, the first time both teams were ranked since 2012. Heisman hopeful Kyler Murray got Oklahoma out to a fast start scoring on a 6-play, 65-yard drive that took only 2:40. On the ensuing possession, Texas, led by sophomore quarterback Sam Ehlinger, answered back with a 5-play 75-yard drive, in what was to be a common theme in the highest scoring game in series history. Texas appeared destined to regain the Golden Hat after taking a commanding 45–24 lead with just under a minute left in the third quarter but three unanswered touchdowns, including a 67-yard run by Kyler Murray that took only 11 seconds, tied the game at 45–45 with just 2:38 left to play. After driving the ball to the Oklahoma 23-yard line, Texas's Freshman kicker, Cameron Dicker, coolly kicked in a 40-yard game-winning field goal with 14 seconds left to play. Sam Ehlinger set the Texas Red River Showdown record for total offense with 394 yards.


title: Red River Showdown

text: On December 1, the two faced off again in AT&T Stadium in Arlington to determine the Big 12 Conference Championship. It was the third time in history when they played again in the same season (1901 and 1903). No. 5 Oklahoma overcame a strong start by No. 14 Texas to win their fourth straight Big 12 title.


title: Red River Showdown

text: On October 12, 2019, the sixth-ranked Sooners defeated the 11th-ranked Longhorns 34–27, getting 366 yards and four touchdowns from quarterback Jalen Hurts, a graduate transfer from Alabama. Though Oklahoma's lead was never larger than 14, Texas was playing from behind for almost the entire game, catching up midway through the third quarter before a 51-yard Hurts touchdown pass to CeeDee Lamb that put the Sooners in front for good.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The October 10, 2020 meeting saw unranked Oklahoma outlasting No. 22 Texas 53–45 in four overtimes, in the third highest-scoring game in the history of the Red River Showdown.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The latest meetings from October 9, 2021 and October 8, 2022 saw two different shades of Texas football. The 2021 matchup saw sixth-ranked Sooners rallying from a 21-point first quarter deficit to edge the 21st-ranked Longhorns 55–48 in the highest-scoring game in the rivalry. In 2022, 3–2 Texas scored 28 in the first half, and went on to record an embarrassing 49–0 shutout over the 3–2 Sooners.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The Oklahoma–Texas game has been played in six locations. They have played in Norman and Oklahoma City in Oklahoma; Arlington, Austin, Dallas and Houston in Texas. The series began in 1900 and has been played in Dallas since 1912, except for 1913 (Houston), 1922 (Norman), and 1923 (Austin). Dallas was chosen as a "neutral" site since it is situated approximately halfway between Austin, Texas and Norman, Oklahoma – the locations of Texas and Oklahoma, respectively.


title: Red River Showdown

text: Since 1932 the game has been held at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, during the State Fair of Texas. The designated "home" team alternates from year to year: Oklahoma in even-numbered years and Texas in odd-numbered years. Ticket sales for the game are split 50–50 between the two schools, with the stadium divided along the 50-yard line. Historically, the Oklahoma fans have occupied the south end zone, which contains the tunnel where both teams enter and exit the field. Beginning in 2007, the teams have option to alternate North and South ends of the field, thereby giving the home team fans the seats adjacent to the tunnel leading to both teams' locker rooms. However, Texas has declined to exercise its option to move to the south end each year in which they have been the designated home team. However, former Texas coach Charlie Strong said he would favor Texas fans being in the south end zone during their home games.


title: Red River Showdown

text: On June 10, 2014, Dallas officials announced that the football game between Oklahoma and Texas would be held at Fair Park through 2025.


title: Red River Showdown

text: In their 2018 regular season matchup, No. 19 Texas beat No. 7 Oklahoma, 48–45 at the Cotton Bowl in Fair Park, on October 6. Later, during the 2018 postseason, the two met in the Big 12 Championship Game after Oklahoma finished first, followed by Texas in the Big 12 standings, which was the first time since 1923 that the two teams played in a location other than Dallas. Oklahoma was victorious by a score of 39–27, winning their fourth consecutive and twelfth overall Big 12 Conference championship.


title: Red River Showdown

text: Rankings from AP Poll (and CFP Rankings, for 2018 Big 12 Championship Game) - Released prior to game.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The highest attendance in series history is 96,009, occurring first in 2009 and then again in both 2010 and 2011.


title: Red River Showdown

text: There are three Red River Rivalry trophies given to the winner of the annual Red River Rivalry: the Golden Hat, the Red River Rivalry trophy, and the Governors' trophy.


title: Red River Showdown

text: The Golden Hat is by far the best known of the three, and the only one to be awarded on the field at the end of the game. The trophy is a gold cowboy hat mounted on a large block of wood. According to "The Daily Texan", "...[B]oth teams signed a contract to play in Dallas during the Texas State Fair, beginning with the 1929 season. The deal was for 10 years, but the tradition has carried on for three-quarters of a century. To show its gratitude, the fair donated the Golden Hat trophy, a golden replica of a ten-gallon cowboy hat, which the two teams play for every year. The Longhorns won the first Shootout, but since then the Golden Hat has crossed the Red River many times." The trophy was created in 1941. When it was created it was known as the "Bronze Hat" or "Brass Hat", and it was bronze in color. However, when the hat was reworked in the 1970s it came out gold, and is now known as the Golden Hat. The Golden Hat trophy is kept each year by the winning team's athletic department. With the teams meeting twice in 2018 (once in the regular season and once in the Big 12 Conference Championship Game) it was determined that the Golden Hat would not be on the line in the 2nd game as it was in the regular season game. Therefore, the trophy remained in Austin, Texas, after Texas' 48–45 regular season win over Oklahoma in 2018. Oklahoma won the rematch, 39–27 in the Big 12 Title Game.


title: Red River Showdown

text: Since 2003, the Red River Rivalry trophy has been exchanged between the student bodies of the two schools. This trophy was developed by Alex Yaffe, former OU Student Body President, and Katie King, UT's former student body president. The trophy bears the image of the two states as well as miniature football helmets to represent both teams.


title: Red River Showdown

text: There is also a governors' trophy exchanged between the governors of the two states. The governors of Texas and Oklahoma often place a bet on the game such as the losing governor having to present a side of beef to the winning state governor, who then donates the beef to charity.


title: Red River Showdown

text: Another annual tradition is the running of game balls by the schools' Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps programs. Each school's ROTC program uses a relay running system to run one game ball all the way from their respective campus to Dallas. Once there, they participate against each other in a football scrimmage, with the winner taking home the Red River Shootout Flag Football Trophy. This trophy is awarded without regard to who wins the main football game.


title: Aleksa Palladino

text: Aleksa Federici Palladino (born September 21, 1980) is an American actress and singer, perhaps best known for her lead roles in "Manny & Lo", "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole", "Find Me Guilty", Angela Darmody in the HBO crime series "Boardwalk Empire" (2010-2011), Mara in "" (2007), "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" (2007), "The Midnight Swim" (2014), Mary Sheeran in "The Irishman" (2019), and "No Man of God" (2021). She also played a main role in the second season of the AMC period drama "Halt and Catch Fire". From 2007 to 2018, she was one half of the dreampop duo Exitmusic with former husband Devon Church, releasing the albums "The Decline of the West" (2007), "Passage" (2012), and "The Recognitions" (2018).


title: Aleksa Palladino

text: Aleksa Federici Palladino was born in New York City, where she grew up and worked as an actress. She is the only child of filmmaker, soprano singer, photographer, graphic artist, and producer Sabrina A. Palladino, and the granddaughter of Sicilian painter and sculptor Angela Fodale Palladino and the Italian-American illustrator and graphic designer Anthony Americo "Tony" Palladino, who designed the lettering for Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho. An episode of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel", created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, is dedicated to Tony. Palladino's aunt, Kate Palladino-Kirk, is a designer, her great-great-uncle Rocco Fodale was a painter from Trapani, and her great-uncle Tonino Fodale worked as a retoucher for the biggest fashion photographers, such as Richard Avedon and Peter Lindbergh. Palladino's ancestral origins are in Naples and Sicily.


title: Aleksa Palladino

text: Her debut role was as "Lo" in "Manny & Lo" opposite Scarlett Johansson, in which she played a 16-year-old character despite being 14 at the time. The next year, she was given her first lead role in the short film "Number One Fan" with Glenn Fitzgerald, and soon appeared in "Wrestling with Alligators" with Joely Richardson, the well-received "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole" with Adrian Grenier, and "Second Skin" with Fitzgerald again.


title: Aleksa Palladino

text: The year 2000 saw the release of "Red Dirt", followed by the independent film "Lonesome", and "Storytelling" with Selma Blair. She then had guest appearances in "" (where she played two different characters), "The Sopranos" and "Law & Order".


title: Aleksa Palladino

text: In 2004, Palladino returned to acting with a guest appearance on "Medium", followed by her lead role in "Spectropia" and a supporting one in "Find Me Guilty" with Vin Diesel. After she worked in "Find Me Guilty", director Sidney Lumet offered Palladino the role of Chris Lasorda in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead". She then appeared in "The Picture of Dorian Gray", based on the novel by Oscar Wilde, and landed a supporting role in the acclaimed horror sequel "".


title: Aleksa Palladino

text: The 2010s saw her busy mainly on television; her role as Prohibition-era gangster Jimmy Darmody's closeted wife Angela in the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire" stands out. She was also a series regular of season two in the critically acclaimed AMC series "Halt and Catch Fire" as Sara Wheeler. Her next important film role was Mary Sheeran in Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman", which was distributed by Netflix and received only a limited theatrical release.


title: Aleksa Palladino

text: For over ten years she was the lead singer and songwriter of the band Exitmusic, which she formed with her husband Devon Church. After a self-released album in 2007, the band released an EP in 2011 and a full-length album in 2012 for the indie label Secretly Canadian. A final album followed in 2018 for Felte Records.


title: Aleksa Palladino

text: Palladino met Church in 2001 while on a cross Canada train trip. They married on September 30, 2004, before separating in 2013. Their divorce was finalized in 2015. They had no children together.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Jafar Panâhi (, ; born 11 July 1960) is an Iranian film director, screenwriter, and film editor, commonly associated with the Iranian New Wave film movement. After several years of making short films and working as an assistant director for fellow Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, Panahi achieved international recognition with his feature film debut, "The White Balloon" (1995). The film won the Caméra d'Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, the first major award an Iranian film won at Cannes.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Panahi was quickly recognized as one of Iran's most influential filmmakers. His films were often banned in Iran, but he continued to receive international acclaim from film theorists and critics and won numerous awards, including the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival for "The Mirror" (1997), the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for "The Circle" (2000), and the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for "Offside" (2006). His films are known for their humanistic perspective on life in Iran, often focusing on the hardships of children, the impoverished, and women. Hamid Dabashi has written, "Panahi does not do as he is told—in fact he has made a successful career in not doing as he is told."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: After several years of conflict with the Iranian government over the content of his films (including several short-term arrests), Panahi was arrested in March 2010 along with his wife, daughter, and 15 friends, and later charged with propaganda against the Iranian government. Despite support from filmmakers, film organizations, and human rights organizations around the world, in December 2010 Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on directing any movies, writing screenplays, giving interviews with Iranian or foreign media, or leaving the country except for medical treatment or making the Hajj pilgrimage. While awaiting the result of an appeal he made "This Is Not a Film" (2011), a documentary feature in the form of a video diary. It was smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive hidden inside a cake and shown at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. In February 2013 the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival showed "Closed Curtain" ("Pardé") by Panahi and Kambuzia Partovi in competition; Panahi won the Silver Bear for Best Script. Panahi's subsequent film "Taxi" also premiered in competition at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2015 and won the Golden Bear, the prize awarded for the best film in the festival. In 2018 he won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay (tied) for "3 Faces"; he was unable to leave Iran to attend the festival, so his daughter, Solmaz Panahi, read his statement and received the award on his behalf.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Panahi was born in Mianeh, Iran. He has described his family as working class and grew up with four sisters and two brothers.<ref name="http://www.offscreen.com"></ref> His father worked as a house painter. His family spoke Azerbaijani at home, but Persian with other Iranians. When he was ten years old he wrote on 8mm film camera. He also acted in one film and assisted Kanoon's library director in running a program that taught children how to operate a film camera. Starting at age 12, Panahi worked after school in order to afford to go see films. His impoverished childhood helped form the humanistic worldview of his films.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: At age 20 Panahi was conscripted into the Iranian army and served in the Iran–Iraq War, working as an army cinematographer from 1980 to 1982. In 1981 he was captured by Kurdish rebels and held for 76 days. From his war experiences he made a documentary that was eventually shown on TV. After completing his military service, Panahi enrolled at the College of Cinema and TV in Tehran, where he studied filmmaking and especially appreciated the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Luis Buñuel, and Jean-Luc Godard. At school he first met and befriended filmmaker Parviz Shahbazi and cinematographer Farzad Jodat, who shot all of Panahi's early work. During college he interned at the Bandar Abbas Center on the Persian Gulf Coast, where he made his first short documentary films.<ref name="http://www.menggang.com"></ref> He also began working as an assistant director on his Professor's films before graduating in 1988.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Panahi made several short documentary films for Iranian television through the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting's Channel 2. His first short film, "The Wounded Heads" ("Yarali Bashlar"), was a documentary about the illegal mourning tradition of head slashing in the Azerbaijan region of northern Iran. The film documents a mourning ceremony for the third Shi'ite Imam, Imam Hossein, in which people hit their heads with knives until they bled. Panahi had to shoot in secret and the film was banned for several years. In 1988 Panahi filmed "The Second Look" ("Negah-e Dovvom"), a behind-the-scenes documentary short on the making of Kambuzia Partovi's film "Golnar". It focuses on the puppet maker for Partovi's film and his relationship with his puppets. It was not released until 1993. In 1990 he worked as an assistant director on Partovi's film "The Fish" (1991).


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In 1992 Panahi made his first narrative short film, "The Friend" ("Doust"), an homage to Kiarostami's first short film, "The Bread and Alley". That same year Panahi made his second narrative short, "The Final Exam" ("Akharin Emtehan"). Both films starred non-professional actors Ali Azizollahi and Mehdi Shahabi and won awards for Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing at Iran's National TV Festival that year. Inspired by a story of a young Luis Buñuel once contacting successful film director Jean Epstein to ask for a job in filmmaking, Panahi left a message on Kiarostami's answering machine saying that he loved his films and asking for a job on his next film. Kiarostami hired Panahi as his assistant director for the film "Through the Olive Trees". He had seen several of Panahi's short films and in 1995 said he was "extremely gifted and can be a promising figure in our cinema's future."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In 1995 Panahi made his feature film debut, "The White Balloon" ("Badkonak-e sefid"), produced by IRIB- Channel 2, Ferdos Films and the Farabi Cinema Foundation. Initially titled "Happy New Year", Panahi developed the original story with Parviz Shahbazi and attempted to get funding from IRIB's Channel 1 with the expectation that it would be a short film, but his proposal was rejected. He then showed his original treatment for the film to Kiarostami during the shooting of "Through the Olive Trees". Kiarostami encouraged Panahi to make the idea into a feature and agreed to write the script. During their car rides to set while shooting, Kiarostami would dictate the film's script while Panahi taped the conversation and typed the script. Kiarostami also helped Panahi secure funding from IRIB's Channel 2. While casting the film, Panahi traveled throughout Iran in order to include all of the diverse ethnicities of his country as characters in the film. He found lead actress Aida Mohammadkhani at the first school that he visited and immediately cast her as Razieh, but auditioned 2,600 young boys for the role of Razieh's brother Ali before settling on Mohsen Kalifi. He cast non-professionals in most of the supporting roles, including a real fish seller he found in the Rasht market and a college student to portray the young soldier. He also cast professional actress Anna Borkowska as an Armenian woman.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In the film Razieh, a strong-willed little girl in Tehran, wants to buy a lucky goldfish for the upcoming Iranian New Year celebration, but struggles to get and hold on to the 500-toman banknote needed to purchase the fish. Panahi worked closely with Mohammadkhani, gaining her trust and acting out each scene for her to mimic while still adding her own personality to the performance. Panahi was most concerned about Mohammadkhani being able to cry on cue, so he would have her stare at him off camera while he started to cry, causing her to cry. Filming began in early April 1994 in Kashan, Iran and continued until early June. Panahi has stated that during the making of his feature debut he "wanted to prove to myself that I can do the job, that I can finish a feature film successfully and get good acting out of my players." He also stated that "In a world where films are made with millions of dollars, we made a film about a little girl who wants to buy a fish for less than a dollar – this is what we’re trying to show." In Iran, films depicting children are the most likely to avoid censorship or political controversy, and "The White Balloon" was screened exclusively in theatres that specialized in children's films. Because of this the film had low attendance on its initial run in Iranian theatres, with only 130,000 tickets sold.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: It went on to win four prizes in Iran at the Isfahan Film Festival for Children and Young Adults and at the Fajr International Film Festival. For several years after its release, Kanoon's Channel 2 would broadcast the film every year on New Year's Day. Outside of Iran "The White Balloon" received excellent reviews and was shown at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Camera d'Or. It also won the Golden Award of the Governor of Tokyo for Best Film and the Bronze Dragon for Best Film of Young Cinema at the 1995 Tokyo International Film Festival, the International Jury Award at the 1995 São Paulo International Film Festival and the Best Film Award at the 1996 Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival. It was Iran's official submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 68th Academy Awards; however, the Iranian government asked the Academy to withdraw the film after began to deteriorate. The Academy refused to withdraw the film, which was not nominated, and Panahi was forbidden by the Iranian government to travel to the Sundance Film Festival or to participate in phone interviews with US reporters to promote the film.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Panahi's second feature film was "The Mirror", produced by Rooz Films. Initially Panahi was going to direct Kiarostami's script for "Willow and Wind", but he decided to pursue his own work instead. Panahi was inspired to make the film when while attending the 1996 Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea he noticed a young girl sitting alone on a park bench staring blankly into space, and realized that he had seen this same thing countless times in Iran and never paid attention to it. He has stated that he "choose a precocious child and placed her in a situation where she is left to her own devices. Everyone she meets on her journey is wearing a mask or playing a role. I wanted to throw these masks away." The film stars Mina Mohammadkhani, the sister of Aida Mohammadkhani. In the film Mohammadkhani could be said to play two characters: the role of a little girl named Baharan and then herself as the film shifts into a documentary mode. Panahi reported casting her after having detected " a feeling of emptiness within her, and a determination to prove herself to the world." It received the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival, the Special Jury Award and Best Director Award at the 1998 Singapore International Film Festival, the Golden Tulip Award at the 1998 Istanbul Film Festival, the FIPRESCI Prize and the Eisenstein Magical Crystal and Cash Award at the 1998 Riga International Film Festival, and Buñuel's Golden Era Award at the Royal Archive Film Festival in Belgium.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In 2000 Panahi made "The Circle", produced by Jafar Panahi Film Productions and Mikado-Lumiere&Co. Although Panahi claimed that he was not a political filmmaker, his third feature was a major departure from his first two works about children and is critical of the treatment of women under Iran's Islamist regime. Panahi has stated that "I started my career making children’s films, and while doing that I had no problems with censors. As soon as I started making feature films, it all started and I had problems," but that "in my first films, I worked with children and young people, but I began to think of the limitations facing these girls once they grow up. In order to visualize these limitations and to have this constraint better projected visually, I went to a social class, which has more limitations to areas that are more underprivileged, so that this idea could come out ever stronger." He had to wait an entire year to get an official shooting permit.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: The film was shot in 35 days over a 53-day period. As usual, Panahi used non-professional actors, with the exceptions of Fatemeh Naghavi and Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy. He saw the lead actress, Nargess Mamizadeh, in a park one day and immediately offered her the role. The film opens with one long, handheld shot that lasts over three minutes and took 13 attempts to achieve. Panahi adopted a different camera style to depict each of the four main protagonists' lives. For the first, an idealistic woman he used a handheld camera. For the second woman, the camera is mounted on a constantly moving dolly. The third woman's story is told at night in darker outside, and the camera is static with pans and tight close ups. For the last, least optimistic woman both the camera and the woman are completely immobile and very little sound is used. Panahi submitted the film to the Venice Film Festival without getting a permit from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. At the festival it won the Golden Lion, the FIPRESCI prize, the UNICEF prize, the Ecumenical Special Mention, the Sergio Trazzati Award and Mamizadeh won the Italian Film Journalist's Award for Best Actress. The Ministry of Culture and Guidance issued a permit for the film a few days before its screening at the festival, although they already knew that it had been submitted illegally. The Ministry later banned the film in Iran. Panahi was worried that the Ministry would "confiscate and mutilate" all copies of the film, so he made multiple copies and hid them all over Iran. Irans's Cinema Deputy Mohammad-Hassan Pezeshk said that "The Circle" was banned because it had "such a completely dark and humiliating perspective." It was later withdrawn by Iranian authorities from the Fajr International Film Festival for being "offensive to Muslim women".


title: Jafar Panahi

text: The film went on to win the FIPRESCI Film of the Year Award at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, appeared on Top 10 lists of critics worldwide and won the Best Film Award at the Montevideo International Film Festival and the Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Panahi directed "Crimson Gold" in 2003, produced by Jafar Panahi Productions. The film depicts an impoverished pizza delivery man's failed attempt to rob a jewelry store and the events that drove him to his crime. The story is based on real events that Panahi first heard about when Kiarostami told him the story while they were stuck in a traffic jam on their way to one of Kiarostami's photographic exhibits. Panahi was extremely moved by the story and Kiarostami agreed to write the script for him to direct. Panahi submitted the film to the Cannes Film Festival without being granted a permit from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Panahi had applied for the permit but the Ministry demanded several cuts be made to the film. Panahi refused and submitted the film anyway. At the festival it won the Un Certain Regard Jury Award. It later won the Golden Hugo Award for Best Film at the Chicago International Film Festival. Like "The Circle", "Crimson Gold" was banned in Iran.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In 2006 Panahi made "Offside". In the film, a group of young Iranian girls disguise themselves as boys to sneak into Azadi Stadium to watch the World Cup qualifying football playoff game between Iran and Bahrain. The film was partially shot during the actual game it depicts. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution women have been banned from attending football matches in Iran on grounds of rowdy and aggressive language, lewd behavior, and seeing men in shorts and short sleeve shirts. At one point Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had wanted to repeal the law but was overruled by the ulema. Panahi has stated "I use the football game as a metaphor to show the discrimination against women on a larger scale. All my movies have that topic at their center. This is what I am trying to change in Iranian society." The film was inspired by an incident several years earlier when Panahi's daughter was refused entry to a football stadium but ended up sneaking into the stadium anyway.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Knowing that the film would be controversial, Panahi and his crew submitted a fake script about some young men who go to a football match to Iranian authorities in order to get permission to make the film. However, before they began shooting the Ministry of Guidance, which issues licenses for films to be shown publicly, told Panahi in advance that because of his past films they would not issue "Offside" a license until he re-edited his previous films. Not wanting to miss the World Cup tournament, Panahi ignored the Ministry and began shooting the film. As usual, Panahi cast non-professional actors for the film, and the group of young girls in the lead roles were mostly university students that Panahi found through friends who all were passionate fans of football. The film was shot in 39 days and in order to move unnoticed through large crowds Panahi used digital video for the first time so as to have a smaller, more inconspicuous camera. Panahi also officially listed his Assistant Director as the Director of the film so as not to attract the attention of the Ministry of Guidance or the Disciplinary Forces of Tehran, but towards the end of the films shooting a newspaper article about the making of the film listed Panahi as the director and both organizations attempted to shut the film down and confiscate the footage. Only a sequence that takes place on a bus remained to be filmed so Panahi was able to continue filming without being caught.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: The film premiered in competition at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival, where Panahi was awarded with the Silver Bear Jury Grand Prix. Like "The Circle" and "Crimson Gold" before it, "Offside" was banned from being shown in Iran. Panahi had already set up distribution for the film all over Iran and the film was predicted to break all box office records. Two days after being banned and twenty days before the World Cup championship game, unlicensed DVD copies of the film became available all over Iran. Panahi has stated that of his films "Offside" is "probably the one that people have seen the most" in Iran. After the film's release a feminist protest group in Iran called the White Scarf Girls began showing up at football matches carrying banners that read: "We don't want to be Offside" Sony Pictures Classics, the film's U.S. distributor, wrote a letter to the Ministry of Guidance in Iran requesting that the film be shown for at least one week in its home country so that they could launch a campaign to nominate the film for Best Foreign Language Film, but the Ministry refused.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In 1997 Panahi made the documentary short film "Ardekoul". In 2007 he contributed the short film "Untying the Knot" to the omnibus film "Persian Carpet". The film contains one single long take and is inspired by his childhood. In 2010 he made the short film "The Accordion", which was commissioned for the "THEN AND NOW Beyond Borders and Differences" series of short film by Art for The World. It premiered at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. Panahi has referred to the situation in Iran as "the dark ages for filmmaking in Iran" and that he was "presenting the future with something to see, a document of what life was like at that time."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Panahi directed a segment of the anthology film "The Year of the Everlasting Storm" which will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in July 2021.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: On 15 April 2001 Panahi stopped over at JFK International Airport in New York City en route from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires, where he was to participate in a film festival. He was immediately detained by police officers who wanted to fingerprint and photograph him; Panahi refused both requests on the grounds that he was not a criminal. He was threatened with jail and refused an interpreter or a phone call. After being handcuffed and detained at the airport until the next morning, he was finally allowed to make a phone call to his friend Professor Jamsheed Akrami. He was finally photographed and sent back to Hong Kong.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In 2003 Panahi was arrested and interrogated for four hours by the Information Ministry in Iran, then released after being encouraged to leave Iran.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: On 30 July 2009 Mojtaba Saminejad, an Iranian blogger and human rights activist writing from Iran, reported that Panahi had been arrested at the cemetery in Tehran where mourners had gathered near the grave of Neda Agha-Soltan. He was able to contact friends in the film industry, both in Iran and internationally, and filmmakers and the news media pressured the Iranian government to release him. He was detained for eight hours. The Iranian government claimed he had been arrested by mistake.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In September 2009 Panahi travelled to Montreal to act as the Head of the Jury at the 2009 Montreal World Film Festival. At the festival he convinced the entire jury to wear green scarves during the opening and closing ceremonies in solidarity with the Green Movement in Iran. He also openly supported and appeared in photographs with Iranian Green Movement protesters at the festival.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In February 2010 Panahi's request to travel to the 60th Berlin Film Festival to participate in the panel discussion on "Iranian Cinema: Present and Future. Expectations inside and outside of Iran" was denied.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: On 1 March 2010 Panahi was arrested again. Plainclothes officers took him, his wife Tahereh Saidi, daughter Solmaz Panahi, and 15 of his friends to Evin Prison. Most were released 48 hours later, and Mohammad Rasoulof and Mehdi Pourmoussa on 17 March 2010, but Panahi remained in section 209 inside Evin Prison. The government confirmed his arrest but did not specify the charges.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: On 14 April 2010, Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance said that Panahi had been arrested because he "tried to make a documentary about the unrest that followed the disputed 2009 reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: On 18 May Panahi sent a message to Abbas Baktiari, director of the Pouya Cultural Center, an Iranian-French cultural organization in Paris, saying that he was being mistreated in prison and his family threatened and as a result had begun a hunger strike. On 25 May he was released on $200,000 bail while awaiting trial.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: On 20 December 2010, after convicting Panahi of "assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic," the Islamic Revolutionary Court sentenced him to six years' imprisonment and a 20-year ban on making or directing any movies, writing screenplays, giving interviews to media, or leaving Iran except for Hajj holy pilgrimage to Mecca or medical treatment. Panahi's colleague Mohammad Rasoulof also received six years' imprisonment but that was reduced to one year on appeal.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: On 15 October 2011, a court in Tehran upheld Panahi's sentence and ban. Following the decision, Panahi was placed under house arrest. He has since been allowed to move more freely but he cannot travel outside Iran.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: On 11 July 2022, Panahi was arrested when he went to the prosecutor's office to follow up on the situation of another film-maker, Mohammad Rasoulof. He was the third director detained in less than a week.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: France's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and minister of culture and communications Frédéric Mitterrand, German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, Government of Canada, Finnish Green MP Rosa Meriläinen and Human Rights Watch have condemned the arrest.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: On 8 March 2010 a group of well-known Iranian producers, directors and actors visited Panahi's family to show their support and call for his immediate release. After more than a week in captivity, Panahi was finally allowed to call his family. On 18 March 2010 he was allowed to have visitors, including his family and lawyer. Iran's culture minister said on 14 April 2010 that Panahi had been arrested because he "was making a film against the regime and it was about the events that followed election." In an interview with AFP in mid-March, Panahi's wife, Tahereh Saeedi, denied that he was making a film about post-election events, saying: "The film was being shot inside the house and had nothing to do with the regime."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In mid-March 50 Iranian directors, actors and artists signed a petition seeking Panahi's release. American film directors Paul Thomas Anderson, Joel & Ethan Coen, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Robert De Niro, Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, Richard Linklater, Terrence Malick, Michael Moore, Robert Redford, Martin Scorsese, James Schamus, Paul Schrader, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, and Frederick Wiseman signed a letter on 30 April 2010 urging Panahi's release. The petition ends, "Like artists everywhere, Iran’s filmmakers should be celebrated, not censored, repressed, and imprisoned." He was named a member of the jury at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival but because of his imprisonment he could not attend, and his chair was symbolically kept empty.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: On 23 December 2010 Amnesty International announced that it was mobilizing an online petition spearheaded by Paul Haggis and Nazanin Boniadi and signed by Sean Penn, Martin Scorsese, Harvey Weinstein and others to protest Panahi's sentence.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Cine Foundation International, a "nonprofit film company and human rights NGO aiming to 'empower open consciousness through cinema'" announced on 3 January 2011 that it was launching a campaign of protest films and public actions calling for Panahi's release. "The campaign will include protest films that speak to human rights issues in Iran and throughout the world, six of which are commissioned feature-length, plus twenty shorts. Participating filmmakers may act anonymously or through pseudonyms since voicing their stories can be dangerous. The films, which will address themes of nation, identity, self, spiritual culture, censorship and imprisonment, will be aimed for public, web and various exhibition media". Later in January, CFI deployed a video protest mechanism called White Meadows (named for the Mohammad Rasoulof film The White Meadows, which Panahi edited) and developed by Ericson deJesus (of Yahoo! and frog design) at the foundation's request. The video mechanism "allow(s) anyone in the world to record a short video statement about Panahi and Rasoulof. There will be an ESCAPE button at top, allowing quick exit for those in countries where recording a statement would be dangerous. There will an option to have the screen black, and soon, voice distortion. The video statements will be recorded as mp4s, giving them maximum transmedia capacity, which essentially makes them broadcastable from any device that can show video". Users can also use the mechanism to comment on how they would "like to see as an international response by the film industry", comment on the state of human rights in general, or "report a human rights abuse to the world".


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In his March 2011 greetings to the Iranian people on the occasion of the Iranian New Year, U.S. President Barack Obama cited Panahi's case as an example of Iran's oppressive regime. In April 2011 Time Magazine placed Panahi third on its list of the Top 10 Persecuted Artists who have challenged authority.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In Spring 2011 Boston's American Repertory Theater and System of a Down's Serj Tankian dedicated their production of "Prometheus Bound" to Panahi and seven other activists, stating in program notes that "by singing the story of Prometheus, the God who defied the tyrant Zeus by giving the human race both fire and art, this production hopes to give a voice to those currently being silenced or endangered by modern-day oppressors".


title: Jafar Panahi

text: On 26 October 2012 Panahi was announced as a co-winner of the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize. He shared the award with Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh. European Parliament President Martin Schulz called them "a woman and a man who have not been bowed by fear and intimidation and who have decided to put the fate of their country before their own". Catherine Ashton, the European Union High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said of the prize, "I am following the case of Nasrin Sotoudeh and other human rights defenders with great concern ... We will continue to campaign for the charges against them to be dropped. We look to Iran to respect the human rights obligations it has signed up to". Panahi's daughter Solmaz accepted the award.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In March 2013 Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi wrote an article highly critical of Panahi and his decision to continue making films and partially blaming him for the "tragic endings of Iranian cinema". Dabashi had previously written extensively about and praised Panahi's early career. Dabashi called Panahi's two post-arrest films "self-indulgent vagaries farthest removed from" his previous films and wrote that Panahi "should have heeded the vicious sentence and stayed away from his camera for a while and not indulge, for precisely the selfsame social punch that have made his best films knife-sharp precise has now dulled the wit of the filmmaker that was once able to put it to such magnificent use."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In August 2013, shortly after the election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, several well-known political prisoners were released. One such prisoner was Panahi's Sakharov Prize co-winner Nasrin Sotoudeh, whose release prompted European Parliament President Martin Schulz to say "We are eagerly waiting to welcome her in Strasbourg together with her Sakharov Prize co-winner, film director Jafar Panahi." A few days earlier the House of Cinema, Iran's largest professional guild for filmmakers, reopened after having been deemed illegal in January 2012.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In the middle of the controversy and court appeal, Panahi broke the ban imposed on him from making films and made the documentary feature "This Is Not a Film" (2011) in collaboration with Iranian filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. The film was made for €3,200 and shot on a digital camcorder and an iPhone. It was shot in four days over a ten-day period in March 2011 and its title was inspired by René Magritte's painting "The Treachery of Images". In the film Panahi sits in his apartment making phone calls about his court case, watching TV news stories, interacting with his neighbors, talking about his past films and describing scenes from the film that he had begun shooting when he was arrested (much as he had described scenes from films to his sisters as a child). Ten days before the opening of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, "This Is Not a Film" was announced as a surprise entry into the festival. It was smuggled out of Iran on a USB thumb drive that had been hidden inside a cake. Panahi's wife and daughter attended the festival. In December 2012 it was shortlisted as one of 15 films eligible for Best Documentary Feature at the 85th Academy Awards.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In October 2012 Kiarostami told a journalist that Panahi had completed a new film that he predicted would be screened in film festivals. In January 2013 the Berlin Film Festival announced that it would premiere "Closed Curtain" ("Pardeh") at its 2013 festival. This film was co-directed by Panahi and Kambozia Partovi, who both appear in it along with cast members Maryam Moqadam and Hadi Saeedi. Berlin Film Festival director Dieter Kosslick is a longtime supporter of Panahi and said that he "asked the Iranian government, the president and the culture minister, to allow Jafar Panahi to attend the world premiere of his film at the Berlinale." In the film Partovi and Moqadam star as two people wanted by the police who hide out in a house on the Caspian Sea and always keep the curtains closed to avoid detection. The film was shown in competition at the 63rd Berlinale in February 2013. Panahi won the Silver Bear for Best Script.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In January 2015 it was announced that Panahi's film "Taxi" was scheduled to premiere in competition at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival. Panahi was awarded the Golden Bear for the film at the festival.


title: Jafar Panahi

text: It has been described as "a portrait of the Iranian capital Tehran" and as a "documentary-like film is set in a Tehran taxi that is driven by Panahi."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In December 2014 Panahi won a 2014 Motion Picture Association Academy Film Fund grant for $25,000 for the screenplay "Flower" ("Gol"). He was awarded the grant at the 8th annual Asia Pacific Screen Awards in Brisbane, Australia. The script is about disabled people in Iran and will be directed by Panahi's son Panah Panahi. Panahi will be the executive producer of the film. It has been described as exploring "the turmoil created by a father’s conviction that he must kill his disabled son to bring peace to his family. This challenging drama is drawn from real life, and brings home the plight of people with disabilities in Iran. This film will be directed by Jafar’s son, Panah, who is an emerging director of distinction and shares his father’s humanist concerns."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Panahi's style is often described as an Iranian form of neorealism. Jake Wilson describes his films as connected by a "tension between documentary immediacy and a set of strictly defined formal parameters" in addition to "overtly expressed anger at the restrictions that Iranian society imposes".


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Panahi differs from his fellow realist filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami in the explicitness of his social critique. Stephen Teo writes that


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Panahi says his style can be described as "humanitarian events interpreted in a poetic and artistic way". "In a world where films are made with millions of dollars, we made a film about a little girl who wants to buy a fish for less than a dollar ["The White Balloon"]—this is what we're trying to show", he said. Panahi has said that "in all of my films, you never see an evil character, male or female. I believe everyone is a good person."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: In an interview with Anthony Kaufman, Panahi said: "I was very conscious of not trying to play with people's emotions; we were not trying to create tear-jerking scenes. So it engages people's intellectual side. But this is with assistance from the emotional aspect and a combination of the two."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Hamid Dabashi has called Panahi the least self-conscious filmmaker in the history of Iranian film and said that his films represent a post-revolutionary Iranian outlook on itself, calling "Crimson Gold" not just a history of a failed jewellery robbery "but also [a history] of recent Iranian history, the history of the failed Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war in particular."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Dabashi praises Panahi's restrained depiction of violence, saying that his "manner of showing violence without showing who has perpetrated it has now become a trademark of Panahi's cinema." Dabashi specifically cites Razieh's brother in "The White Balloon" as clearly having been beaten in one scene, but only being given hints of the violence of Razieh's father from off screen. In "The Circle" Nargress has been beaten but we are never told why or by whom. Dabashi writes, "violence in Panahi's cinema is like a phantom: you see through it, but it lacks a source or physical presence—who has perpetrated it is made intentionally amorphous. The result is a sense of fear and anxiety that lurks in every frame of his film, but it is a fear without an identifiable referent."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Some Iranians have criticized his work, claiming that his films "don't draw a realistic picture of Iran, or that the difficulties encountered by women in [his] films apply to only a certain class of women."


title: Jafar Panahi

text: Panahi is married to Tahereh Saidi, whom he first met in college when she was working as a nurse. They have a son, Panah Panahi, born in 1984, and a daughter, Solmaz Panahi. Panah Panahi attended the University of Tehran and in 2009 made his first short film, "The First Film", which was screened at the 2009 Montreal World Film Festival. Solmaz studied theater in Tehran.


title: Marie de France

text: Marie de France (fl. 1160 to 1215) was a poet, possibly born in what is now France, who lived in England during the late 12th century. She lived and wrote at an unknown court, but she and her work were almost certainly known at the royal court of King Henry II of England. Virtually nothing is known of her life; both her given name and its geographical specification come from her manuscripts. However, one written description of her work and popularity from her own era still exists. She is considered by scholars to be the first woman known to write francophone verse.


title: Marie de France

text: Marie de France wrote in Francien, with some Anglo-Norman influence. She was proficient in Latin, as were most authors and scholars of that era, as well as Middle English and possibly Breton. She is the author of the "Lais of Marie de France". She translated Aesop's Fables from Middle English into Anglo-Norman French and wrote "Espurgatoire seint Partiz", "Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick", based upon a Latin text. Recently, she has been (tentatively) identified as the author of a saint's life, "The Life of Saint Audrey". Her "Lais" were and still are widely read and influenced the subsequent development of the romance/heroic literature genre.


title: Marie de France

text: The actual name of the author now known as Marie de France is unknown; she has acquired this nom de plume from a line in one of her published works: "Marie ai num, si sui de France," which translates as "My name is Marie, and I am from France." Some of the most commonly proposed suggestions for the identity of this 12th-century poet are Marie of France, Countess of Champagne; Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury and half-sister to Henry II, King of England; Marie, Abbess of Reading; Marie I of Boulogne; Marie, Abbess of Barking; and Marie de Meulan, wife of Hugh Talbot and daughter of Waleran de Meulan. Based on evidence from her writings, it is clear that, despite being born in France, she spent much of her life living in England.


title: Marie de France

text: Four works, or collections of works, have been attributed to Marie de France. She is principally known for her authorship of "The Lais of Marie de France", a collection of twelve narrative poems, mostly of a few hundred lines each. She claims in the preambles to most of these Breton lais that she has heard the stories they contain from Breton minstrels, and it is in the opening lines of the poem "Guigemar" that she first reveals her name to be Marie.


title: Marie de France

text: There are 102 "Ysopet" fables that have also been attributed to her besides a retelling of the "Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick" and, recently, a saint's life called "La Vie seinte Audree" about Saint Audrey of Ely, although this last attribution is not accepted by all critics.


title: Marie de France

text: Scholars have dated Marie's works to between about 1160 and 1215, the earliest and latest possible dates respectively. It is probable that the "Lais" were written in the late 12th century; they are dedicated to a "noble king", usually assumed to be Henry II of England or possibly his eldest son, Henry the Young King. Another of her works, the "Fables", is dedicated to a "Count William", who may have been either William of Mandeville or William Marshall. However, it has also been suggested that Count William may refer to William Longsword. Longsword was a recognized illegitimate son of Henry II. If Marie was actually Henry II's half-sister, a dedication to his son (who would be her nephew), might be understandable.


title: Marie de France

text: It is likely that Marie de France was known at the court of King Henry II and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. A contemporary of Marie, the English poet Denis Piramus, mentions in his "Life of Saint Edmund the King", written in around 1180, the lais of a Marie, which were popular in aristocratic circles.


title: Marie de France

text: It is clear from her writing that Marie de France was highly educated and multilingual; this level of education was not available to the common or poor at this time, so we can infer that Marie de France was of noble birth, as other noble women such as Heloise and Christine de Pizan were also educated and wrote. In addition to secular wealthy women, a number of religious women of this period also used their education and pursued writing (Hrotsvitha, Héloïse, Bridget of Sweden, and Hildegard of Bingen, to name a few).


title: Marie de France

text: She was first called "Marie de France" by the French scholar Claude Fauchet in 1581, in his "Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise", and this name has been used ever since. She wrote in Francien, a dialect localized around Paris and Île-de-France, but there is presence of an Anglo-Norman dialect in her writings. Hence scholars generally deduce she lived in the parts of Île-de-France close to Normandy, or alternatively in an area in-between such as Brittany or Vexin. But Anglo-Norman influence may be due to her living in England during her adult life, which is also suggested by the fact that so many of her texts were found in England. The signification of the phrase "si sui de France", however, is ambiguous and equivocal. Marie might possibly not have stated that she was from France if she was originally from a region governed by Henry II such as Brittany, Normandy, Anjou or Aquitaine, unless she had been thoroughly anglicized.


title: Marie de France

text: Three of the five surviving manuscript copies of the "Lais" are written in continental French, whilst British Library MS Harley 978, written in Anglo-Norman French in the mid-13th century, may reflect the dialect of the copyist.


title: Marie de France

text: Breton lais were certainly in existence before Marie de France chose to recast the themes that she heard from Breton minstrels into poetic narratives in Anglo-Norman verse, but she may have been the first to present a "new genre of the lai in narrative form." Her lays are a collection of 12 short narrative poems written in eight-syllable verse that were based on Breton or Celtic legends, which were part of the oral literature of the Bretons. The lais of Marie de France had a huge impact on the literary world. They were considered a new type of literary technique derived from classical rhetoric and imbued with such detail that they became a new form of art. Marie may have filled her detailed poems with imagery so that her audience would easily remember them. Her lais range in length from 118 ("Chevrefoil") to 1,184 lines ("Eliduc"), frequently describe courtly love entangled in love triangles involving loss and adventure, and "often take up aspects of the "merveilleux" [marvellous], and at times intrusions from the fairy world."


title: Marie de France

text: One may have a better sense of Marie de France from her very first lay, or rather, the "Prologue" she uses to prepare her readers for what is to come. The first line dictates “Whoever has received knowledge/ and eloquence in speech from God/ should not be silent or secretive/ but demonstrate it willingly” Marie de France, in so many words, credits her literary skills to God and is therefore allowed to write the lays without her patron’s permission (her patron likely being Henry II of England). She wants people to read what she has produced, along with her ideas, and as such urges readers to search between the lines, for her writing will be subtle. In this "Prologue" alone, Marie de France has deviated from common poets of her time by adding subtle, delicate, and weighted writing to her repertoire. Marie de France took her opportunity as a writer to make her words be heard, and she took them during a time where the production of books and codexes was a long, arduous, and expensive process where just copying the Bible took fifteen months until the text’s completion.


title: Marie de France

text: Unlike the heroes of medieval romances, the characters in Marie’s stories do not seek out adventure. Instead, adventures happen to them. While the settings are true to life, the lais often contain elements of folklore or of the supernatural, such as Bisclavret. While the setting is described in realistic detail, the subject is a werewolf, sympathetically portrayed. Marie moves back and forth between the real and the supernatural, skillfully expressing delicate shades of emotion. Lanval features a fairy woman who pursues the titular character and eventually brings her new lover to Avalon with her at the end of the lai. The setting for Marie's lais is the Celtic world, embracing England, Wales, Ireland, Brittany and Normandy.


title: Marie de France

text: Only five manuscripts containing some or all of Marie’s lais exist now, and the only one to include the general prologue and all twelve lais is British Library MS Harley 978. That may be contrasted with the 25 manuscripts with Marie's "Fables" and perhaps reflects their relative popularity in the late Middle Ages. In these Fables, she reveals a generally aristocratic point of view with a concern for justice, a sense of outrage against the mistreatment of the poor, and a respect for the social hierarchy. Nevertheless, Marie's lais have received much more critical attention in recent times.


title: Marie de France

text: Along with her lais, Marie de France also published a large collection of fables. Many of the fables she wrote were translations of Aesop’s fables into English and others can be traced to more regional sources, fables to which Marie would have been exposed at a young age. Among her 102 fables, there are no concrete guidelines for morality; and men, women, and animals receive varying treatments and punishments.


title: Marie de France

text: Marie de France introduces her fables in the form of a prologue, where she explains the importance of moral instruction in society. In the first section of the prologue, she discusses the medieval ideal of "clergie". Clergie is the notion that people have a duty to understand, learn, and preserve works of the past for future peoples. Here, in the prologue, she is referencing the duty of scholars to preserve moral philosophy and proverbs. The rest of Marie de France’s prologue outlines how Aesop took up this duty for his society and how she must now preserve his fables and others for her present culture.


title: Marie de France

text: Structurally, each of the fables begins with the recounting of a tale, and at the end Marie de France includes a short moral. Some of these morals, like those translated from Aesop’s fables, are expected and socially congruous. For instance, the fable of "The Wolf and the Lamb", also known as Fable 2 in Marie’s collection, follows a well-known and established storyline. Just as in Aesop’s original fable, Marie de France’s translation describes a lamb and a wolf drinking from the same stream, the wolf unjustly condemning the lamb to death for drinking inoffensively downstream from him. Marie de France repeats the established moral at the end, "But these are things rich nobles do…destroy folk with false evidence".


title: Marie de France

text: However, in the new fables, featuring human female characters, Marie de France asserts female power and cunning, disparaging men who are ignorant or behave foolishly. One character, a peasant woman, makes multiple appearances in the fables and is praised for her shrewd and sly ways. Fables 44, "The Woman Who Tricked Her Husband" and 45, "A Second Time, a Woman Tricks Her Husband", both recount tales of the same peasant woman successfully carrying out an affair despite her husband having caught her with her lover both times. In the first fable, the peasant woman convinces her husband that her lover was merely a trick of the eye and in the second, persuades her husband that he has had a vision of her and a man, foreshadowing her death. Marie lauds the woman for her crafty ways and faults the peasant husband with idiocy. The morality, or lack thereof, in these two female-centered fables is interesting and takes root in the tradition of "wife tricking her husband" stories, such as "The Merchant’s Tale" and Scots-Irish tradition.


title: Marie de France

text: According to the epilogue of the "Fables", they are translated from an English version by Alfred the Great.


title: Marie de France

text: In most of Marie de France’s "Lais", love is associated with suffering, and over half of them involve an adulterous relationship. In "Bisclavret" and "Equitan", the adulterous lovers are severely condemned, but there is evidence that Marie approved of extramarital affairs under certain circumstances: "When the deceived partner has been cruel and merits deception and when the lovers are loyal to one another." In Marie's "Lais", "love always involves suffering and frequently ends in grief, even when the love itself is approved."


title: Marie de France

text: Marie's lovers are usually isolated and relatively unconcerned with anything outside the immediate cause of their distress, whether a jealous husband or an envious society. However, "the means of overcoming this suffering is beautifully and subtly illustrated." "Marie concentrates on the individuality of her characters and is not very concerned with their integration into society. If society does not appreciate the lovers, then the lovers die or abandon society, and society is the poorer for it."


title: Marie de France

text: Marie de France’s lais not only portray a gloomy outlook on love but also defied the traditions of love within the Church at the time. She wrote about adulterous affairs, women of high stature who seduce other men, and women seeking escape from a loveless marriage, often to an older man, which gave the idea that women can have sexual freedom. She wrote lais, many of which seemed to endorse sentiments that were contrary to the traditions of the Church, especially the idea of virginal love and marriage.


title: Marie de France

text: The lais also exhibit the idea of a stronger female role and power. In this, she may have inherited ideas and norms from the troubadour love songs that were common at the Angevin courts of England, Aquitaine, Anjou and Brittany; songs in which the heroine "is a contradictory symbol of power and inarticulacy; she is at once acutely vulnerable and emotionally overwhelming, irrelevant and central." Marie's heroines are often the instigators of events, but events that often end in suffering.


title: Marie de France

text: The heroines in Marie's "Lais" are often imprisoned. This imprisonment may take the form of actual incarceration by elderly husbands, as in "Yonec", and in "Guigemar", where the lady who becomes Guigemar's lover is kept behind the walls of a castle which faces the sea, or "merely of close surveillance, as in "Laustic", where the husband, who keeps a close watch on his wife when he is present, has her watched equally closely when he is away from home." Perhaps it reflects some experience within her own life. The willingness to endorse such thoughts as adultery in the 12th century is perhaps remarkable. "It certainly reminds us that people in the Middle Ages were aware of social injustices and did not just accept oppressive conditions as inevitable by the will of God."


title: Marie de France

text: In addition to her defying the construct of love exhibited by the contemporary Church, Marie also influenced a genre that continued to be popular for another 300 years, the medieval romance. By the time Marie was writing her lais, France already had a deep-rooted tradition of the love-lyric, specifically in Provence. Marie's "Lais" represent, in many ways, a transitional genre between Provençal love lyrics from an earlier time and the romance tradition that developed these themes.


title: Marie de France

text: Her stories exhibit a form of lyrical poetry that influenced the way that narrative poetry was subsequently composed, adding another dimension to the narration through her prologues and the epilogues, for example. She also developed three parts to a narrative lai: aventure (the ancient Breton deed or story); lai (Breton melodies); conte (recounting the story narrated by the lai). Additionally, Marie de France brought to the fore a new genre known as chivalric literature.


title: Marie de France

text: In the late 14th century, at broadly the same time that Geoffrey Chaucer included "The Franklin's Tale", itself a Breton lai, in his "Canterbury Tales", a poet named Thomas Chestre composed a Middle English romance based directly upon Marie de France's "Lanval", which, perhaps predictably, spanned much more now than a few weeks of the hero's life, a knight named "Sir Launfal". In 1816, the English poet Matilda Betham wrote a long poem about Marie de France in octosyllabic couplets, "The Lay of Marie".