Rating: NR | Runtime: 106 minutes
Release Date: 2022 (Iran) / December 23rd, 2022 (USA)
Studio: Janus Films / Sideshow
Director(s): Jafar Panahi
Writer(s): Jafar Panahi

Our fear empowers others

These are words spoken by a local villager where writer/director Jafar Panahi’s fictionalized self is staying near the Turkish border to be as close to the cast and crew he’s directing remotely from his laptop. He says them minutes after warning that bears roam the streets—admitting it was all a lie in accordance with the stories told to children to try and keep them safe.

Whether just a fairy tale in this case, however, there are real “bears” in Panahi’s world. The government would like nothing more than to put him in jail or worse for not complying with orders to stay within Iran’s border. His own fear prevents him from crossing that imaginary line despite it seeming so easy to do so. But if it were really that simple, why are so many being killed for trying?

No Bears puts tradition and superstition on trial opposite reality as we watch two different couples facing the choice between a “safe” future outside of their control that they do not want and one that threatens their lives in pursuit of a future they do. Couple #1 is Bakhtiar (Bakhtiyar Panjeei) and Zara (Mina Kavani)—subjects and actors in Panahi’s latest film. Trying to flee for ten years, they have allowed him to both document and reenact the process so that he can turn their story into an authentic cinematic depiction.

Couple #2 is Solduz (Amir Davari) and Gozal (Darya Alei)—young lovers hoping to marry despite her hand being promised to another at birth. Panahi sees both as potential happy endings, believing in (and even actively facilitating) the simplicity of their love while the volatility of their surroundings seeks to destroy it.

That result is an intriguingly meta journey wherein Panahi manufactures real life through a documentary aesthetic to expose just how paranoid and self-serving the conservative climate of Iran proves. He becomes a sort of bystander along with us, gleaning partial truths, choosing sides, and carefully hoping to preserve his own tenuous safety in the process considering the danger he puts himself in by filming let alone doing so this close to a border he’s legally unable to cross.

The drama has stakes both in the city (Zara can leave safely, but refuses without her husband) and the village (love backing Solduz and Gozal into a corner) with Panahi’s continued involvement placing him in the spotlight too. It’s a scathing commentary on political and familial oppression packaged as a dual romance on an unavoidable fast-track towards tragedy.

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Jafar Panahi taking a photograph in NO BEARS; courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films.