By Steve Erickson

Rather than coming across as angry or urgent, Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s No Bears feels muted, perhaps even subdued to the point of depression.

No Bears, directed by Jafar Panahi. Screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre starting on February 10

In No Bears, director Jafar Panahi (right) puts himself into the fictional storyline. Photo by ARP Sélection

During this year’s protests in Iran, the government has targeted filmmakers. Back in July, directors Jafar Panahi, Mohammad Rasoulof, and Mustafa Al-Ahmad were all arrested within a week. As No Bears opens in the U.S., Panahi was just released from jail. This isn’t his first run-in with the Iranian government; he’s faced legal troubles with them several times, beginning with an arrest in 2003. By 2010, they were done fooling around with him. He was arrested in March of that year and received a six-year sentence that included a 20-year ban on speaking to the media, directing or writing films. While confined to his house awaiting his case’s appeal, he made the documentary This Is Not a Film.

His two latest features, 3 Faces and No Bears, show that he had some ability to travel within Iran, but this year the government stopped tolerating his dissent. After going on a 48-hour hunger strike, they finally freed him from prison on February 3rd. Even so, his future as a person and filmmaker probably depends on the success of current country-wide protests against the regime.

One might not have predicted this future from his debut feature, The White Balloon, but Panahi started testing the waters with political gestures in his second film, The Mirror. Because its celebration of female rebellion consisted of a young girl dropping out of a movie shoot, it seemed pretty innocent, but Panahi implied, ironically, that his own practice as a filmmaker was on the side of authoritarianism. In a much more lighthearted way, it was his version of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s portrait of himself as a petty tyrant ruling over actors’ auditions in the 1995 documentary Salaam Cinema. No Bears picks up this thread.

No Bears begins with a scene of two Iranian refugees, Zara (Mina Kavani) and Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjei), sitting at a sidewalk café in Turkey. It was filmed in a single seven-minute take. The couple are trying to procure false passports so they can flee the Middle East and fly to Western Europe. Refugees for about a decade, Kavani and Panjei are acting out a fiction that is based on their own lives. We learn that No Bears is a film-within-a-film. Barred from traveling outside Iran, Panahi stays in an apartment he rented in the village of Jaban, near the Turkish border. He directs his actors and crew via Zoom on his laptop.

All the sequences in the film-within-the-film are shot in single takes, aside from one exception, which breaks the fourth wall. Kavani begins to talk to Panjei about her own feeling that he has betrayed. Meanwhile, the director’s presence leads to tension within Jaban. He’s suspected of taking and owning a photo of two young people, Gozal (Darya Alei) and Soldooz (Amir Davari). Soldooz is in trouble for protesting against the government but the pair are also trying to evade an arranged marriage. Because of the alleged photograph, Panahi becomes caught up in a local squabble that’s not fully explained to him or us. Asked to testify in a makeshift court by swearing in on the Quran, he insists on filming the ceremony.

Earlier in the U.S. this year Jafar’s son Panah released his debut feature Hit the Road, in which a family travels to the border of Turkey so that their son can leave Iran and escape prosecution. The themes of Hit the Road and No Bears – cars as a potential space of freedom and transformation, interactions between well-off urbanites and the poor in rural villages – have been staples of Iranian cinema since the ‘90s. The similarities between father and son’s films are impossible to miss; in fact, Hit the Road seemed to riff on Jafar’s real-life situation, imagining a possible solution.

No Bears is similarly concerned with borders and their arbitrary nature. In the middle of the night, Panahi drives to the edge of Turkey to pick up the hard drive with footage of the film shoot. Asking “where is the border exactly?,” his assistant informs him “you’re standing on it.” But he refuses to step over into Turkey, and eventually learns that the border is under heavy surveillance. Favors called in to even allow the director to approach it.

Panahi began his career as a protégé of the late Abbas Kiarostami. He was the assistant director on Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees, and the older filmmaker co-wrote the scripts of The White Balloon and Crimson Gold. Kiarostami’s Close Up (1990) was the breakthrough film that established the director’s international reputation (and put Iranian cinema on the map), a heady mix of neorealist semi-documentary and reflexivity about filmmaking and the power of celebrity. (Though its acceptance was very slow in the U.S.) Panahi’s 3 Faces and No Bears both bear Kiarostami’s influence. The director flat out lifts a scene — in which he steps outside to find a cell phone signal — from The Wind Will Carry Us. No Bears’ concern with the effect of filmmaking on two couples with whom Panahi interacts has a hint of Kiarostami’s more upbeat Through the Olive Trees. This interplay between director and characters might be a statement about the artist and control. Panahi lives under a shadow, in this fictionalized version and in real life, but he still exerts a degree of power over the people he films. He still can swoop into a town like Jaban and extract what he wants from it, including political-tinged drama.

As a character, Panahi is mostly silent; he has little desire to explain himself. No Bears might have benefited from the light touch of 2006’s Offside, although the reasons behind the film’s heavier tone are understandable. Rather than coming across as angry or urgent, No Bears feels muted, perhaps even subdued to the point of depression. There are intimations of disaster. The film becomes most powerful in its last half hour, its final shot returning to the car for a self-lacerating conclusion. The fictional Panahi might be able to run away from trouble, but it may well take a revolution to return the director to his art.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, The Bloodshot Eye of Horus, was released in November 2022, and is available to stream here.