No Bears

No Bears, Jafar Panahi’s fifth feature in defiance of the 2010 ban that forbade him from making films or leaving Iran, finds the filmmaker in a village near the Turkish border, remotely directing a film crew on the other side. But even before we realise where we are, something unusual catches the eye in the opening shot: the panning camera, directly observing a street without an intervening windscreen, displays a liberty that has become precious in Panahi’s cinema.

A slow, outward zoom, however, soon brings us back to reality, reframing the street view through a laptop screen, behind which sits Panahi, directing the scene over video call. We learn that he is remotely making a fictional film with documentary elements, featuring an exiled Iranian couple trying to sneak into Europe. Meanwhile, in the village, Panahi is sucked into a scandal involving a photograph he may have made of another couple, contravening the established order.

In this slippery mise en abyme of documentary and fiction, the only indisputable truth is the figure of Panahi himself, who has made his very being the primary material for his work over the past decade. Older and clearly wearier, Panahi offers in No Bears a bitter meditation on the dangers of image-making, even as he asserts its necessity in the face of superstition and tyranny.

– Srikanth Srinivasan

This film is part of the vfonds Freedomline. Click here for an overview of the other films that have been selected for the vfonds Freedomline.