No Bears (2022)
With the brilliant and devastating No Bears, Iranian director Jafar Panahi won the Special Jury Award at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year. It is also one of my favourite films of the year.
The socially conscious filmmaker is now serving a six-year prison sentence inhis homeland on some trumped up charge. It only makes his work more relevant.
In No Bears, Panahi himself plays the leading role as a filmmaker called Jafar Panahi, who is no longer allowed to make movies or leave the country because he has been too critical of the regime.
Therefore, he has to make his new film in secret. He has rented a room in a village near the Turkish border and directs the filming that takes place just across the border via Skype: a fact-based love story about a couple who fled to the west with false passports.
In between filming, Panahi gets involved in another love story in the village where he is staying. He would have accidentally taken a photo of a couple having an illegal relationship. The consequences could be terrible for the young lovers, since the girl is to be part of an arranged marriage.
No Bears starts off deceptively simple, but the movie gradually becomes more layered. It helps if you are familiar with the work of Kiarostaimi and Makhmalbaf, but if you don't you should just dive in. The way in which Panahi mixes docu-drama and auto-fiction to devastating emotional effect is once again cause for admiration.
No Bears, which is currently playing the festival circuit, is up there with other Panahi classics such as The Circle and his Golden Bear winner Taxi Tehran.
The material also sits well with the topicality of the Iranian protests. Criticism of the regime in the movie starts with some subtle remarks, but the tone becomes increasingly sharp and when Panahi lets his actors talk openly about torture in Iranian prisons, it is clear that the director has thrown all caution to the wind.
This is the work of someone who has (almost) nothing left to lose. It is also one of the best movies of the year.