News
NO BEARS, BY JAFAR PANAHI
Media:
No Bears review - Jafar Panahi heads for the border in complex metafiction of fear
Jailed director Jafar Panahi plays a version of himself, forced to shoot his new film in a town near the border with Turkey
As Iranian women rise up against their misogynist bullies, this is a good time to watch Jafar Panahi's latest film, set in a village whose inhabitants are encouraged to be scared of supposed "bears" roaming the countryside - just as the Iranian people are supposed to be afraid of their morality police. No Bears is a complex, mysterious metafiction about the anguish of Iran and the artist working within Iran. Its creator, film-maker and democracy campaigner Panahi, has recently been sentenced to six years in jail after long periods of house arrest since a bogus propaganda charge in 2011.
Panahi plays "Jafar Panahi", a film director who is forbidden to make films or leave the country. So his new movie is shooting in a small Turkish town just over the border; it stars an Iranian couple, Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjei) and Zara (Mina Khosravani), based on their own actual ordeal in trying to escape Iran for good. Panahi has delegated the hands-on direction to his assistant Reza (Reza Heydari), and he is watching the filming via Skype. He could easily do this from Tehran, but due to a compulsion to be close to the action (and to freedom), Panahi is doing this from a rented room in a tiny Iranian village just a few miles the other side of the border. The villagers themselves have accepted his cover story that he is there to photograph local customs...
By Peter Bradshaw
............................................................................................................................
"Astonish me!" was the directive that the great dance impresario Serge Diaghilev gave to those who hoped to work with him. It is also what we demand of our best filmmakers. The Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who's now, to the best of our knowledge, in a prison serving a six-year sentence on charges that don't amount to a hill of beans in any world that makes sense, is a world-class filmmaker whose work has not astonished like this in some time.
Not entirely his fault, of course. Making films in Iran is never easy, and Panahi has been subjected to constant harassment from the country's government throughout his career, to the point that he was officially forbidden from making films, and essayed a 2011 work, depicting his house arrest, pointedly titled "This Is Not A Film." As I observed in a review of his 2015 "Taxi," "necessity and courage have been the mothers of his cinematic invention." But the fruits of that invention, enlightening and dispiriting in equal measure, took on a predictable tinge over time...
BY Glenn Kenny
READ MORE: No Bears movie review & film summary (2022) | Roger Ebert
