Astonishing cinema: No Bears reviewed

Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is, first and foremost, a wonderful film. More than this, you don’t need to know but I’ll tell you anyway. Panahi, an Iranian filmmaker, was banned from making films by the Iran government in 2010 yet has persisted clandestinely. One of his films (This Is Not a Film) was smuggled to the Cannes festival on a USB stick buried inside a cake. No Bears was wrapped in May this year; Panahi was arrested in July, and now he’s serving a six-year prison sentence for ‘propaganda against the system’. To make a film, any film, against such odds, is astonishing, but one as truly wonderful as this? Mind-blowing.

Panahi plays a version of himself, so it’s auto-fiction which, in this instance, also says: I will not hide away. He’s a director renting a room in an Iranian village just over the border from Turkey where his latest production is set. He is directing remotely, internet connection allowing, and has relocated from Tehran as he wants to be as close to the action as possible. (He’s banned from leaving the country, just as the real Panahi was.) The film he is making is a love story about an Iranian couple who have made it to Turkey but are awaiting fake passports so they might flee to Europe. In addition, the actors in this film are themselves seeking to flee. Everyone is trapped somehow. Everyone wants to escape. But how, and to what?

The village scenes are fascinating in and of themselves because rural Iran is so foreign to us. The basic houses look as if they’ve been burped up by the stony landscape. The women cook using ground ovens, drawing pots out of the earth. Chickens scrabble everywhere.