No Bears’ (Jafar Panahi)
The veteran filmmaker Panahi (“The White Balloon”), a longtime critic of the Iranian government, has been making movies under extremely challenging circumstances, including house arrest.
In No Bears, he plays a version of himself, a filmmaker named Jafar Panahi who has moved temporarily to a small town as he remotely directs a movie in nearby Turkey.
It’s an impossibly difficult process as well as an act of profound resistance.
In his devastating story of displacement, Panahi manages to remain creative against all odds, crossing borders that are both imagined and real.
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The film’s most haunting scene sees Panahi the director at night, on a remote road along the border of Iran and Turkey, as his colleague urges him to cross the border, and Panahi looks down and steps back.
In stepping back, Panahi stands in solidarity with the current protesters defying their government’s authority.
Panahi, recently sentenced to prison in Iran, and previously banned from directing movies there, continues his relentless investigation of his country’s politics and his own vocation.
His movie offers testimony to the power of cinema as a tool of resistance. and potential agency of social change, even as he reckons with its limitations.
