Jafar Panahi, 2022, Iran, 107m
One of the world’s great cinematic artists, Jafar Panahi has been crafting self-reflexive works about artistic, personal, and political freedom for the past three decades, and his risk-taking output has never slowed down even amidst his globally condemned treatment by the Iranian government.
The international film community vehemently denounces Panahi’s summer 2022 arrest, this time for his vocal support of a fellow artist’s independence, he has made a new film, and it is another virtuosic sleight of hand.
No Bears is the ninth feature directed by Panahi and the first one since 3 Faces in 2018; the filmmaker had made two shorts in between.
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UK release poster
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In addition to writing, directing and producing No Bears, Panahi also stars in the film with Naser Hashemi [fa], Vahid Mobasri, Bakhtiar Panjei, Mina Khosravani, and others.
Panahi is said to have received more freedom to produce the film after the end of the curfew imposed in 2022, due to the spread of COVID-19.
In No Bears, as in many of his recent titles, Panahi centers himself, having relocated temporarily to a rural border town to remotely oversee the making of a new film in Tehran.
Prohibited by the government from making films and leaving Iran, due to his politically critical movies, Panahi—playing a fictionalized version of himself—has rented a room at the village of Jaban, near the Iran–Turkey border.
He is remotely directing a docudrama about an Iranian couple, Bakhtiar and Zara, who are attempting to secure fake passports so they can flee the country after years of government abuse. Bakhtiar has successfully acquired a passport for Zara but couldn’t get one for himself, which distresses Zara. \
While watching the sequence through a livestream on his computer, Panahi loses connection and is cut out. Panahi wraps up for the day and goes out to photograph the village.
At night, Reza, Panahi’s assistant director, takes him on a drive. Reza says that the cast and crew are growing weary of Panahi’s absence and that he has arranged with smugglers to take him to Turkey for a few days.
Reza takes Panahi to the border line between Iran and Turkey. but Panahi gets scared, and drives back to Jaban. As he arrives at the village, he’s approached by a young woman named Gozal, who desperately asks Panahi if he took a photo of her with her boyfriend Solduz; she says that if anyone see it “all hell will break loose” and “there will be blood.”
Asked about the pictures he took, Panahi is told about a tradition in the village, when a girl is born, her umbilical cord is cut in the name of her future husband. He says Gozal’s was cut for Jacob, who’s expecting to marry her soon, but that Solduz is barring that from happening. The villager says Solduz’s father is offended and feeling dishonored by the accusation, and asks for the photo so Solduz’s father will intervene and keep his son away from Gozal. Panahi denies ever taking a photoof Gozal and Solduz together.
That night, he’s visited by Solduz, who explains to him that he and Gozal are in love and that in a week’s time they will elope and leave the village.
That story comes to a sharp reflection of disturbing events that occur around Panahi. In these parallel, cross-hatching narratives, Panahi keeps pulling the rug out from under the viewer as he confronts the binary concepts of tradition and progress, city and country, spiritual belief and photographic evidence, and the human desire to escape from oppression.
No Bears premiered at the 79th Venice Film Festival in competition, without the presence of the director, who has been arrested and sentenced to six years prison in Iran, prior to the film’s release.
Distributed by Celluloid Dreams, the film won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Fest and received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics.
Language: Farsi, Azerbaijani, Turkish with English subtitles
