No Bears

Fact and fiction, truth and lies swirl about each other in Jafar Panahi’s latest. The film - in which Panahi plays a version of himself - also deals with the age-old conundrum of whether to stay or go.

Panahi himself doesn’t currently have the latter option, having been detained by the Iranian authorities back in July and ordered to serve six years in prison. Given that, since the filmmaker was banned from making movies in 2010 by the regime he has made 10 features and shorts, it’s unlikely this latest act of repression will succeed in silencing him either.

“Our fear empowers others,” a villager notes in this twin-track drama, which follows Panahi’s onscreen persona as he travels to an Iranian border village. Just over the frontier, his film crew are shooting a docufiction film about Zara (Mina Kavani) and Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjei), a couple who are trying to leave for Europe. Their fear? Being split up in the process.

While dogged by dodgy internet, Panahi finds himself embroiled in another fraught romance after the villagers become convinced he has taken a photo of a forbidden assignation and who go to increasing lengths to try to get hold of it, despite the filmmaker’s repeated denials. Their fear? That people are breaking tradition - something that takes on additional resonance amid the current civil unrest in the country after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini who was detained by morality police for allegedly breaking the strict hijab rules.

The onscreen Panahi has the option of several types of fear to choose from. He could be scared of the bears, which may or may not exist, near the village. Or frightened of the drug and people smugglers who almost certainly do roam the dusty side roads where he meets up with his assistant Reza (Reza Heydari), who is shooting the Turkish film on his behalf. He could also be afraid for others in the small community and who are showing hospitality to him as an ‘outsider’.

At one point it seems “Panahi” could easily step from one country to the other, but as his film shows, leaving is not always an easy option. The various fictions pull this way and that as Panahi explores, often with considerable humour, the absurdities of tradition and rules. Who all these various fears may be empowering and, indeed, disenfranchising, he leaves for us to deduce. Sadly, he also shows that just because something is absurd, doesn’t mean that it can’t have tragic consequences.