• In "No Bear", Jafar Panahi stages himself as a director who directs a film from a distance.

  • The action is divided between his daily life at the heart of village quarrels and the story of the feature film he is shooting.

  • The filmmaker, imprisoned by the Iranian government since July, received the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for this film.

He does not spare himself, Jafar Panahi in

No Bear

, his new film discovered last September at the Venice Film Festival where he received the Special Jury Prize.

The Iranian filmmaker, imprisoned by the Islamic government since July 2022, secretly shot this film which mixes reality and fiction to tell how an isolated filmmaker shoots a film remotely about the ordeals of two lovers trying to leave the country with false passports.


If he puts himself in the role of the filmmaker, the director

of

Taxi Tehran

and

Three Faces

does not become angelic in any way.

He shows himself as a man who is certainly courageous, but who puts his art first, even if it means exploiting the feelings of his actors or endangering a young couple he photographed without permission.

Here he is soon at the center of fratricidal village quarrels while he also has to manage his filming with a faulty Internet connection.

Go or stay?

The clash between a well-known and cumbersome city dweller and a local population steeped in liberticidal traditions testifies to conceptions of the world that are difficult to reconcile in a country whose divisions we grasp.

"We create works that are not commissions and that is why the state considers us criminals", explained the director in a letter sent to the Venice Film Festival and co-signed by Mohammad Rasoulof, another filmmaker arrested at the same time as him.

Sentenced to six years in prison for “propaganda against the regime” in 2010, Jafar Panahi was able to finish his film before being sent to serve his sentence.

If he was still free at the time of filming, his adventures, as delirious and serious as those of his characters, foreshadow his imprisonment.

The “bears” of the title do not exist and are brandished only to frighten the population and keep them on the straight and narrow.

A deaf threat hovers around him throughout the film, a bitter reflection on what an artist is ready to sacrifice in order to be able to express himself without denying either his convictions or his country.

No Bear

answers that question like the filmmaker did in real life.

Jafar Panahi gave his freedom to live and create but his voice continues to be heard in this tragic and powerful film.

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