In 2010, Iranian director Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison and banned from making films in Iran* or leaving the country for 20 years, due to his alleged “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda.” Since then, he’s released seven feature films which have played internationally and won numerous awards, including the Golden Bear from the Berlin International Film Festival, the Palme d’or from the Cannes Film Festival, and a Special Jury Prize from the Venice Film Festival, which is a record that would make any filmmaker proud.
No Bears, released in 2022, has a lot in common with Panahi’s other post-ban films—it likes to play with perceived reality as created by filmmaking versus the actual reality that all of us live, it was shot on a shoestring in real locations with non-professional actors, and doesn’t deliver a real conclusion—it begins and ends and stuff happens in between, but there’s a minimum of plot and many story lines remain unresolved when the final credits roll. And for all of that it’s never less than fascinating, which is why people keep going to see Panahi’s films and they keep winning awards.
In the opening scene, a café waitress in Turkey named Zara (Mina Kavani) is given a stolen passport by her husband or boyfriend Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjeei) so she can escape to France. She has to leave immediately, and he can’t go with her since he doesn’t have a fake passport for himself. But she doesn’t want to go alone, so they quarrel, and in the midst of all this someone calls “cut” and assistant director Reza (Reza Heydari) addresses the camera directly—and it turns out we’ve been watching all this through the computer screen of the director, Panahi himself, who is across the border in Iran and directing the film remotely.
Due to difficulties with the local internet, on-screen Panahi declares an end to the day’s shooting and ventures out to explore the village and take some photos. This raises a stir because a young woman named Gozal (Darya Alei) thinks he took a shot of her with a man named Solduz (Amir Davari) she’s not supposed to be with due to some village custom about cutting a baby’s umbilical cord. The (male) villagers get involved also and require Panahi to go to their “swearing room” where, apparently, oaths really mean something. Meanwhile, Panahi is trying to get a fake passport for himself and a local legend of roaming bears comes up. Of course there aren’t any bears in actuality, meaning in the fictional world of the villagers (but probably also not in the real village where the actual director Panahi is staying), but it’s a useful fiction so perhaps it’s best to just go with it.
Zara comes back later in the film (in fact, she has a lengthy speech, making her the only female character in this film who gets to express her opinions or do much of anything other than serve men). The men, in contrast, talk a lot, and I have to say their use of dialogue rather than weapons (violence doesn’t progress above a lot of performative shoving) to solve disputes is admirable. And yet those discussions aren’t really free because in this small community there’s no such thing as going your own way: everyone is involved in everyone else’s business and an unwritten and unquestioned set of principles hold the most ordinary of decisions in an iron grip. Panahi in his fictional role as director (and also in reality) is a native of Tehran and hence a foreigner to his kind of society, and his bumbling attempts to live within structures he doesn’t understand yield predictable results.
One argument sometimes made in defense of censorship is that is forces filmmakers to be creative to work around imposed restrictions. Case in point: the many coded languages Hollywood filmmakers developed to signify things that couldn’t be portrayed directly—like “these people just had sex” or “these men aren’t just friends, they’re lovers.” One could make a similar argument for Panahi’s post-2010 films, which have to employ inventive ways to get around the fact that he’s banned from doing the very thing he is in fact doing, which is making films. I don’t buy those arguments excusing censorship, largely because they’re usually made by people who are themselves not subject to the restrictions they praise, but I must say that Panahi has proved himself to be a master of the fine art of refusing to be silenced by his own government. | Sarah Boslaugh
*The ban is actually worse than that—it includes directing or producing films, writing screenplays, or conducting media interviews; the only exceptions to the travel ban are traveling for medical treatment or to go on the Hajj to Mecca.
Spine #: none (Criterion Premieres series).
Technical details: 107 min.; color; screen ratio 1.85:1; Persian, Turkish.
Edition reviewed: DVD (1 disc).
Extras: interview with filmmaker Ramin Bahrani;
Fun Fact: No Bears premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Golden Lion (losing out to Laura Poitras’ documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed) but won a Special Jury Prize, which Mina Kavani and Reza Heydari accepted for Panahi since he could not attend in person.
Parting Thought: I have no data to back me up, but I have a feeling that Jafar Panahi, who made first-rate films from the get-go (his first feature, The White Balloon, won the Camera d’or at Cannes) is even more famous today than he might otherwise be because of his persecution by the Iranian authorities. Which raises a question: have those authorities never heard of the Streisand Effect?
