Just a few days after his film premiered in the main program of the Venice festival, the famous Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison. And it was not his first time, because for more than ten years he has been constantly either in prisons or under house arrest, or he has been banned from making films and moving around. In July 2022, he was arrested after providing support to two colleagues who were also being persecuted by the Iranian regime, and although he was sentenced to six years in prison, he was given house arrest at the beginning of February. Even earlier, after he was banned from making films, Panahi skilfully evaded those bans by secretly making quasi-documentary films in which he himself acts.
These are micro-budget films made in guerilla production, the most famous of which is probably “Taxi”, in which Panahi played himself, i.e. a director who was banned from making films and now drives a taxi in Tehran. This time he managed to get away from Tehran, and once again he is playing himself and how he is shooting a new film in a village right next to the border with Turkey. Thus, in the opening scene of “No Bears”, we see one of the seemingly typical movie love scenes, which is atypical in that the director films it – from afar. Panahi shoots a film in Turkey using a laptop and Zoom from Iran, and again he plays a fictionalized version of himself there. As he is forbidden to leave Iran, he cannot go to a Turkish village a few kilometers away, but directing films remotely is not easy, especially since the internet signal there is very weak.
Although he tries to be incognito in that traditional place and expose himself as little as possible, by chance he will get involved in local customs and will very quickly become persona non grata there. After he hears that there is a traditional custom that is performed there before the wedding, he will lend the camera to one of the locals, but it will turn out that something he did not plan was recorded. He will accidentally record the extramarital adventure of two young locals, and when rumors about their relationship start to spread around the place, the whole village will gather around and ask Panahi to hand over the video to them. Once again, reality and fiction intertwine here, as well as two parallel actions, the one that the director actually witnesses and the one that he films for the film, but it also reminds more and more of what he experiences in the village he temporarily inhabits.
Panahi has long since created his own kind of cinema verite by force of circumstances, and “No Bears” continues to perfect that unusual, almost metafilmic style. The man who was once the most commercially successful Iranian filmmaker and director, who made exceptional and genre films and art films that won awards at the world’s biggest festivals, is in this way partly protesting against the regime that sealed his career. But regardless of the fact that the films from his, let’s call it, student phase, are experimental, low-budget and metafilmic, Panahi is still a favorite among the selectors of the most prestigious festivals, even though he is usually unable to attend the world premieres of his films due to the ban on leaving Iran.