‘Our Fear Empowers Others. No Bears.’

Jafar Panahi’s latest film, No Bears, is one of his most powerful. Photo: Janus Films

Anyone aware of Jafar Panahi’s personal and political predicament over the past 12 years might feel a shiver go up their spine when No Bears, the Iranian director’s latest, opens on a street in an unnamed Turkish city. In 2010, Panahi was arrested for speaking out against the Iranian government and handed a six-year prison sentence. After his appeals failed, he was placed under house arrest and given a 20-year filmmaking ban. But he continued working, clandestinely and cleverly making pictures starring himself that spoke to his physical and spiritual confinement. Each new effort seemed to push against his restrictions a bit more. 2011’s This Is Not a Film was basically a video journal shot in Panahi’s apartment. 2013’s Closed Curtain was an elliptical, paranoid drama filmed at his summer home. For 2015’s Taxi, he drove a cab around Tehran, interacting with a cross-section of society from behind his steering wheel. In 2018’s 3 Faces, he and the Iranian star Behnaz Jafari (playing herself) travel to a remote village to inquire about the alleged suicide of an aspiring teenage actress.

So seeing Turkey in the opening frames of Panahi’s latest, one might be forgiven for briefly thinking the director has finally fled Iran. In fact, his situation as of this writing is troubling: In July, just a couple of months after No Bears wrapped, Panahi was imprisoned, supposedly to serve out that six-year sentence from 2010, and is currently an inmate at Tehran’s Evin Prison, alongside fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad, where he has reportedly been subjected to abuse. While No Bears is profoundly powerful in its own right, the knowledge that its maker is incarcerated gives its explorations of exile, truth, and freedom a throat-catching urgency.

Ironically, Panahi (again playing himself) appears to be a bit freer to move about in No Bears than he’s been in years. Those opening moments in Turkey are quickly revealed to be a scene from a film he is directing remotely, video-conferencing with his cast and crew while he stays in a small Azeri village in Iran near the Turkish border. The movie he’s shooting happens to be about an Iranian refugee couple, Bakhtiyar (Bakhtiyar Panjeei) and Zara (Mina Kavani), who’ve been stuck in Turkey for years and are trying to find a way to leave for another country. In a typical touch of meta playfulness, we’re told that these (fictional) actors are portraying characters based on themselves.

Their situation could also be a projection of sorts. In No Bears’ most captivating scene, Panahi drives into the hills one night for a secret meeting with his assistant director, Reza (Reza Heydari), who has brought over a hard drive with footage from the Turkish shoot. Reza tells Panahi that this whole area is controlled by smugglers and that it would be quite easy to cross over into Turkey. He takes Panahi to a remote hilltop, where the lights of the nearby Turkish city gleam seductively in the night. The director asks Reza where the actual border is. “You are standing on it. Exactly,� the man says. Startled, Panahi jumps back.

That awkward, frightened little leap back across the border haunts No Bears. It would take very little effort, it seems, for Panahi to flee his country and find some semblance of freedom elsewhere. After all, why come to this remote village, where his internet signal is dodgy and where living conditions are rough (and where his fancy car immediately arouses suspicion among the local authorities), to do a remote shoot in another country? He’d get better reception back home in Tehran. When asked about this, Panahi says he wants to be near his production. That’s understandable for a filmmaker so determined throughout his career to capture life as it’s lived; the thought of making a movie while he remains thousands of miles away from the camera must feel obscene to him. But it’s also not hard to imagine Panahi might dream of escape. Maybe merely having the possibility of flight is one small way of reasserting his freedom — even if he doesn’t dare take advantage of it.

Does Panahi refuse to leave because, for all his activism and renegade artistry, he’s still essentially someone who follows the rules? Or does he refuse to leave because without his land he wouldn’t know what to do or who to be? More than any other Iranian filmmaker since his mentor Abbas Kiarostami, Panahi has relied on creating hyperrealistic portraits of ordinary people. He wants — he needs — the world to intrude on his frame, so much so that a couple of his movies have at times been mistaken for documentaries. It’s easy to make similar assumptions while watching No Bears given that Panahi often casts nonprofessionals (including, of course, himself) and films in authentic settings. (I kept having to remind myself I was watching a fiction despite the fact that this curiously modern-looking Turkish border town was clearly Istanbul all the way on the other side of the country.)

The idea of truth — how it’s depicted, manipulated, embraced, and evaded — has always been one of Panahi’s obsessions, perhaps never more so than in this film. As the director tries to deal with a crisis erupting on his Turkish set, he finds himself in the middle of a village scandal back in Iran, where it turns out he might have inadvertently photographed two forbidden lovers, Gozal (Darya Alei) and Solduz (Amir Davari), having a clandestine rendezvous. Gozal has evidently been promised by her family to another man since she was born, and the young lovers want Panahi to hide the picture for at least a week, just enough time for them to escape and elope. A group of local men, however, corners Panahi and asks for the photo to use it as proof against Solduz to keep him away from Gozal.

Interestingly, we never see the snapshot in question, nor do we really know if Panahi even has it. He insists he doesn’t, showing the villagers his camera roll and offering to give them his memory stick. These men never actually accuse Panahi of anything. They’re like a kinder, gentler, rural version of Kafka’s bureaucrats: Polite and deferential, they’re willing to accept his denials, but they keep finding new ways for him to assert them, most notably during a local ritual in which he must swear on the Quran. At one point, a villager takes Panahi aside and tells him it’s okay for him to lie during the ritual. The man also briefly scares him with a story of bears on the loose in the village, then almost as quickly tells him the bears are a myth, a story made up by superstitious townsfolk to scare people. “Our fear empowers others. No bears,� the villager reflects — a seemingly throwaway line that establishes a connection between all the myths, rules, and traditions that bind these characters and the supposed dangers of a world without them. Such customs and institutions, it’s clear, have long lost any meaning or real-life connection. The director’s conflict becomes not so much over what happened or what he witnessed (or didn’t) but what he’s willing to say about it.

This is not a portrait of the artist as brave, truth-telling hero or victim; Panahi is too inquisitive and probably too modest to go that route. When he was forced, over a decade ago, to turn the cameras on himself and become his own subject, he took the opportunity to question the nature of his art and to explore how his work could both express and compromise his humanity. His most recent films (which the scholar Lúcia Nagib called his “forbidden tetralogy,� though I suppose we must now call it a forbidden pentalogy) have undercut the idea of the director as disinterested camera-eye with no agency or imperative. As a filmmaker – or, rather, as the pseudo-fictional filmmaker known as Jafar Panahi he has played in these pictures — he is constantly presented with situations in which he must mull whether to intervene. And, often, he’s caught between the winds. These movies tend toward chaos with the onscreen auteur left powerless, unable to change the world around him.

No Bears might well prove to be Panahi’s final film in this monumental cycle of self-reflective projects. Given his current situation, we do not know what the future holds for him, or for his work. No Bears itself is probably the most powerful expression of the existential hall of mirrors in which he finds himself. On one side of the camera, we have two lovers ready to escape their land. On the other side, we have two lovers who have escaped but haven’t found freedom and are still on the run. And then, behind the camera, we have the director who remains behind and has become the frustrated protagonist of his own tangled, nightmarish drama. As No Bears proceeds, it becomes increasingly hard to tell what we’re watching: a fiction Panahi has scripted, the documentary reality behind that fiction, or another level of truth that has taken over and now threatens to derail his project. And now, by imprisoning this artist who refused to flee, the Iranian authorities have added one final, monstrous layer of meaning to Panahi’s masterpiece.