‘No Bears’: Iranian director’s poignant film champions freedom to create

It’s a truism that those who are imprisoned are among the most likely to cherish freedom. I thought of this as I watched Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s “No Bears,” which was filmed several months before he was sentenced in July 2022 to six years in prison for “propaganda against the Islamic republic.” He joins the fate of so many of his country’s artists and freethinkers.

This extraordinary film, which, despite its tragic trappings, is often surprisingly playful, can be appreciated without knowing anything about Panahi or his long-term battles with the authoritarian regime. Those battles have included a prohibition since 2010 to make movies or leave Iran. But knowing about his past and present ordeals increases the movie’s poignancy. Here is a director so committed to his art that he made a film in 2011 while under house arrest and smuggled it into the Cannes Film Festival reportedly on a USB drive concealed inside a cake.

In “No Bears,” as in a number of his other films, including “3 Faces” and “This Is Not A Film,” Panahi is essentially playing a character very much like himself, with the same name. (To avoid confusion, I will refer to that character in this review within quotation marks as “Panahi.”)

When the film opens in a Turkish town bordering Iran, we are thrust into an extended streetside argument between a couple (played by Bakhtiar Panjei and Mina Kavani) desperate to flee to France. Between them, however, they have only one forged passport. In contrast to director Panahi’s usual slow-going standards, this scene is practically a thrill ride. But it is soon revealed that the two people are actors. As the story progresses, though, it becomes clear that the filmed fictional drama they are enacting parallels their own lives. They are being directed remotely by “Panahi” via video call, despite the bad Wi-Fi, from a nearby Iranian village where he has covertly taken up residence far from his native Tehran in order to make this movie.

But this hall-of-mirrors meta-dramaturgy never descends into airy artifice. Director Panahi is above all a humanist, and the film is graced with a feeling for the village and its people that goes way beyond the ethnographic. We see the women who pridefully ply him with their best traditional dishes. His young landlord, Ghanbar (Vahid Mobasheri), dotes on his famous tenant while also being somewhat suspicious of him. His neighbors are similarly both fascinated and wary. Their voyeuristic attentions parallel the authoritarian surveillance “Panahi” is hiding from.

He is recognized as a prominent person, but his city ways and somewhat gruff sense of entitlement don’t impress the village elders. The director Panahi gives their ancient traditions and superstitions a dutiful, if highly skeptical hearing. When it transpires that “Panahi,” in his wanderings about town, may have snapped an incriminating photo of illicit lovers, the elders mass against him.

They politely but firmly ask to see the photo which “Panahi” claims, probably truthfully, he did not take. In the film’s centerpiece scene, he grudgingly agrees to take an oath on the Quran, in a makeshift “Swear Room” as prescribed by custom, that he did not shoot the photo. (Ghanbar tells him not to worry, that it’s acceptable to lie, just as he admits the rumor of bears roaming the Iranian-Turkish border is a lie to keep the villagers in place.)

The film-within-the-film that “Panahi” is making, with its blighted lovers and yearning for deliverance, mimics the actions of the film itself. The elders’ dogmatic rituals and recriminations point up how both “Panahi” and the director himself are regarded as criminals by those in positions of authority.

Perhaps what is most remarkable about “No Bears” is how, despite all this heavy-duty baggage, it nevertheless averts despair. The reason for this, I think, is because the director Panahi equates filmmaking, no matter the risks, with freedom. “The hope of creating again,” he has written, “is a reason for existence.”

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “No Bears” is unrated. It is available in select theaters.