Earlier this year, the Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi was detained and ordered to serve a six-year prison sentence – the latest politically motivated attempt to silence an artist who has been banned from making movies since 2010. Despite the ban, Panahi has remained a creative thorn in the side of the Iranian authorities. His provocatively entitled This Is Not a Movie (2011) was smuggled out of Iran on a USB drive hidden inside a cake and premiered to great acclaim at Cannes. His next two features, Closed Curtain (2013) and Taxi Tehran (2015), earned him a Silver and Golden Bear respectively at the Berlin film festival, while 3 Faces (2018) won best screenplay at Cannes.
This latest stripped-down work from the world’s most quietly defiant cineaste has already (deservedly) picked up the special jury prize at Venice and the award for cinematic bravery at the Chicago international film festival. Meanwhile, in Miami, where the director was given the film festival’s Precious Gem award, an audio message recorded in prison found Panahi wryly declaring: “I wish that I could make films instead of receiving awards” because “I have dreams that go beyond all the awards in the world.” And what dreams they are!
Given the circumstances of its creation, it’s no surprise that Panahi’s recent output has returned obsessively and self-reflexively to the subject of film-making itself. Here, for example, he once again plays a version of himself – a film-maker directing his latest feature by remote control. His new movie is being shot in Turkey and presents a close-to-life account of a couple, Zara (Mina Kavani) and Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjei), who are facing separation as they attempt to escape to a new life in Europe. Panahi, who cannot leave Iran, is directing them over the web, via a computer screen. But rather than doing so from Tehran, where he had a half-decent internet connection, he has instead rented a room in a remote village near the border, placing him physically closer to the action, but also conjuring a creative barrier as his phone signal constantly drops in and out in almost slapstick fashion.
When assistant director Reza (Reza Heydari) visits Panahi, the pair take a surreally tinged night trip to the Turkish border (a haunting no man’s land peopled by smugglers in speeding vehicles), and he invites the film-maker to step across the invisible line that divides his country from its neighbour. But Panahi has become embroiled in his own domestic drama, his camera having inadvertently drawn him into a dispute (“there will be blood”) between two men, both of whom are attempting to claim the hand of a local girl. Meanwhile, the actors in Turkey are starting to doubt the integrity of their director, whose docudrama threatens to tear them apart in real life, creating two parallel love stories that eerily mirror and reflect each other’s sinister power struggles.
“What about the bears?” asks Panahi as he takes an evening walk to the outskirts of the village, en route to a meeting where he must answer the charge of having taken an incriminating photograph – a photograph he insists does not exist. “There are no bears,” replies his companion, who has previously assured this metropolitan incomer that while “town people have problems with authorities, we have problems with superstition”. It’s all just “nonsense, stories made up to scare us. Our fears empower others. No bears!”
It’s a cute titular exchange that pithily encapsulates the key themes of the drama: the conflation of modern authority and archaic superstition, the town-country divide, the power of storytelling, the oppressiveness of fear and the absurdity of dogma. These are intimate personal scenarios with wider political resonances that reverberate throughout Panahi’s filmography.
Yet No Bears is also a piercingly self-aware portrait of an artist who is not afraid to depict himself and his craft as aloof or insular. Despite all that he has faced, Panahi retains the wit and humility to hold himself accountable – to question his art with remarkable candour and self-deprecation. Filtering his immense contribution to cinema through a deceptively incidental lens, he once again reminds us that movie-making can be a profoundly humane endeavour; at once comedic, tragic and truthful.
