Rent No Bears (2022)

Interesting - No Bears review by sb

FILM & REVIEW Really interesting and unusual film from Iranian film maker Jafar Panahi. It opens outside a cafe where a couple are arguing over fake passports they intend to use to escape the country. A voice shouts cut! and the camera pans back to reveal Panahi himself watching events on a laptop connected to a mobile signal. The filming is taking place over the border in Turkey as Panahi is banned from leaving Iran. He is staying in remote village near the border and the offer to be smuggled out is there but he doesn’t take it. He also gets involved in a local dispute over a rivalry between two men and a local girl. He is accused of taking a picture of the non betrothed couple but is adamant that he has no such thing. It’s also revealed that the apparent fictitious film he is remotely directing is more of a staged documentary where the couple are genuinely desperate for a new life and the camera follows them as thing come apart. So it’s a kinda film within a film without it being made clear where the lines between fact and fiction are drawn…..the whole process remains blurred. Panahi has long been a guerrilla film-maker in Iran but his films achieve widespread acclaim abroad much to the annoyance of the state. To give added poignancy to this the film won an award at Cannes but the director couldn’t attend having been sentenced to 6 years in prison on a trumped up charge of anti state propaganda….. Well worth a look - 4/5

Another gem from Panahi - No Bears review by PD

Given his recent release from jail after being arrested last July (2022), Jafar Panahi's latest offering undoubtedly has a heightened impact as a result, but this artful telling of parallel narratives that intersect with Panahi facing the cost to himself and others of making films under an oppressive regime — completed before his arrest — would be a forceful statement even without the limits imposed on his freedom.

Deceptively simple at first, and then accumulating increasingly complex layers by almost imperceptible degrees, 'No Bears' deals with borders both physical and spiritual, with the divide between tradition and modernity, and the world of difference between Tehran and Iran’s rural backwaters. A character says at one point that it’s OK to lie if it’s in the service of peacekeeping; in the same way, the fear of wild animals in the title is revealed to be an unfounded superstition, designed to keep people in their place. But the film asks what do those restrictions really achieve and why do we give them such power.

While Panahi tries to keep a low profile to avoid being identified and reported to the authorities, he’s drawn into village politics as the elders descend to request a photograph he supposedly took of a young couple. As the situation escalates, the friction around him builds where once there was a welcoming curiosity. Meanwhile, there's a delicate reminder of how black-market traffic is the only commerce available to the village since the drought killed off farming. In a brief but memorable scene, Panahi jumps back as if on a rumbling fault line when he learns that the patch of dirt on which he’s standing is the invisible frontier separating Iran from Turkey. Thoughts sparked by that realisation are echoed in a film-within-a-film being played out before cameras in Turkey, with hesitancy prompted by questions about how much money is needed to survive in Europe, among other concerns. Late in the action, a character explodes in a stunning direct-to-camera rant about the frustration of spending ten years trying to get out of the country but being stuck there, forced to betray herself and others. The blurring of lines between scripted project and documentary is not new to Panahi, but it builds here with expert modulation to a shocking conclusion, whilst Panahi’s stoical presence at the centre of it all is rattled, forcing him to contemplate the repercussions of his work both to himself and to even his most guileless collaborators. The sobering final image resonates with the unspoken cry of an artist exiled in his own homeland, saying, “Enough.” Whether that means escaping the forces that would control him or seizing his creative liberty in more insurgent ways is the question that lingers. The one remaining certainty is that Panahi is among the world’s great filmmakers refusing to be silenced by authoritarian rule. Stirring stuff.