No Bears review: Clever and gripping cinema

On July 11th, 2022, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison on charges of “propaganda against the regime”. His arrest followed more than a decade of locking horns with the government. His films are as improbable as they are defiant. This is Not a Film, from 2011, was shot an on an iPhone while the artist was under house arrest and later smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick hidden in a cake.

Panahi’s ninth feature, which premiered at Venice in the weeks after its maker’s incarceration, is a thrilling testament to the maxim that necessity is the mother of invention. This clever autofiction opens with a sleight of hand as Zara (Mina Kavani), a waitress, slips out from work to meet Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjei), her partner, who has acquired a dodgy passport for her. The scene is set in Turkey but is being directed across the border by Panahi, who is banned from leaving Iran.

He has, accordingly, set up shop in the remote Iranian village of Jabbar, where he struggles with intermittent wifi and intransigent locals. A trip through outlaw country earns the director a polite scolding. This merely serves as a prelude for the series of grillings and accusations to come.

One night, a young woman named Gozal (Darya Alei) begs for Panahi’s help in suppressing a photograph she believes he’s taken of her and Solduz (Amir Davari). She is in love with Solduz but was promised at birth to the lunkheaded Jacob (Javad Siyahi). If the photograph gets out, “There will be blood”, she warns. Panahi insists that no photo exists. The entire village, however, begs to differ.

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The writer-director and star deftly juggles mounting tensions and insular absurdity. Restrictions upon his movements are woven into the narrative. A visit to the border, during which the film-maker stops dead in his tracks, mirrors the reluctance of the heroine of the film-within-the-film to leave everything behind.

Defiant, endlessly resourceful and gripping cinema.