No Bears

Mere weeks sep­a­rat­ed the world pre­mière of Jafar Panahi’s lat­est film No Bears from his lat­est arrest over accu­sa­tions of pro­pa­gan­da against the Iran­ian state. The film­mak­er – first impris­oned in 2010 on the same charges – has been banned from mak­ing movies, writ­ing screen­plays and speak­ing with any Iran­ian or for­eign media for the last 10 years, with anoth­er 10 out­stand­ing on his sentence.

This has not stopped him in that time for he has pro­duced a whop­ping five fea­tures, includ­ing 2011’s sem­i­nal This Is Not a Film and the 2015 Gold­en Bear-win­ner Taxi Tehran. Panahi’s lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal entrap­ment feeds into the meta­tex­tu­al­i­ty of No Bears. Here, the film­mak­er plays him­self, but all else around him is a mix­ture of fact and fic­tion, with two sets of lovers placed against the polit­i­cal struc­tures that have forced the Iran­ian mas­ter into a state­less exile. The first pair com­pris­es a con­tem­po­rary Romeo and Juli­et kept apart by the out­dat­ed rit­u­als of the small com­mu­ni­ty that acts as the director’s refuge; the sec­ond is a pair of long-term part­ners whose rela­tion­ship runs par­al­lel to their fight against Iran’s author­i­tar­i­an régime.

Dias­po­ra is defined by Panahi by this very sense of state­less­ness: ​“He feels trapped, with no future, no free­dom and no job,” the direc­tor tells his fic­tion­al assis­tant (played by his real-life sound design­er Reza Hey­dari), a sim­ply put yet beau­ti­ful­ly lay­ered encap­su­la­tion of this par­tic­u­lar kind of claus­tro­pho­bic despair.

No Bears often echoes Abbas Kiarosta­mi​’s for­lorn 1997 film Taste of Cher­ry, with a car reck­less­ly dri­ving through the arid lands of the Iran­ian desert to car­ry out a nihilis­tic desire to flirt with self-destruc­tion. Yet, Panahi – who start­ed his career under Kiarostami’s wing – bypass­es the melan­cho­lia often employed by his men­tor in favour of tap­ping into a seam of humour that per­me­ates most of his films. Life, as they say, goes on, and No Bears observes peo­ple toil­ing away at exist­ing while Panahi wres­tles with mat­ters existential.

There are no bears in No Bears. The ani­mal stands in for the way in which con­trol is often estab­lished in soci­ety through the per­pet­u­a­tion of Machi­avel­lian myths. ​“Sto­ries are made up to scare us. Our fear empow­ers oth­ers,” a man tense­ly whis­pers to Panahi as they near the heav­i­ly­po­liced Iran­ian bor­ders. The same ground that once bore the stur­dy foun­da­tion of a lov­ing home now stands eter­nal­ly scarred by the sear­ing cuts of imag­i­nary lines, an irrepara­ble fis­sure that – in Panahi’s heart­felt visu­al diary – cru­el­ly sev­ers the frail umbil­i­cal cord to the motherland.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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