Between the time this movie was shot and its release date in Japan, its director, Jafar Panahi, was jailed and then released by the Iranian government for engendering “propaganda against the establishment”; and this on top of the 20-year ban on filmmaking imposed on him a decade ago for the same charge. During the ban, Panahi has continued to make movies in semi-secrecy, and they have been as formally rigorous and thematically thought-provoking as any movies made in Iran—or the world, for that matter. No Bears, at the very least, is his boldest comment on the role of art under a repressive regime, though it’s also his most plot-dependent story in years, which is a function of the situation he created in making it.

Panahi plays himself making a movie remotely from an Iranian village on the Turkish border. Unable to travel abroad legally, he sends his crew to a town on the other side and, through his MacBook, directs his actors and sets up shots as long as the cell coverage cooperates. The movie he is making is about a dissident couple, Zara (Mina Kavani) and Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Penjei), who are trying to secure fake passports in order to emigrate to the West. As we eventually find out, the actors are themselves trying to do the same thing, and Panahi is basically fictionalizing their situation to make a dramatic film, a strategy that backfires with unfortunate consequences. Meanwhile, in the village where Panahi is temporarily resident, the locals look at him with a mixture of awe (his reputation as a director proceeded him, but mainly because his mother is from this area) and suspicion that grows to a certain level of contempt when rumors spread that he has accidentally taken a photo during his stay of a couple who are forbidden from seeing each other because the female half has been betrothed to another man ever since she was born. Panahi dismisses this claim by saying he did not take any such photo and gives the village elders his data card to prove it, but the tensions within the community are so strained that he must go the extra mile to convince them that he is telling the truth, and, as with the movie he’s trying so desperately to complete, his sense of righteousness gets the best of him and ends up making the matter much worse.

The central plot thread is Panahi’s cordial but nonetheless defiant approach to local customs that he doesn’t believe in (“I don’t get the rationale”), an attitude that mirrors his defiance of the Iranian government. But the director doesn’t let himself off the hook. His status as an artist who looks at things from a position of objective intelligence has made him arrogant, and just as the poetic license he possesses prompts him to miscalculate what his machinations are actually doing to the couple who portray his principals in the Turkish movie-within-a-movie, his sense of aggrievement at his own circumstances leads to a second tragedy in the village that affects innocent people who have no involvement in his affairs, be they political or professional. Though No Bears has a rambling structure that’s often frustrating to follow—probably owing to the fraught circumstances of its production—it’s one of the most emotionally affecting works in Panahi’s filmography, and that’s saying something. 

In Persian. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

No Bears home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022_JP Production