He does not spare himself, Jafar Panahi in No bears, his new film discovered last September at the Venice Film Festival where it 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 remotely shoots a film about the ordeals of two lovers trying to leave the country with false passports.
If he puts himself on stage in the role of the filmmaker, the director of Taxi Tehran and of 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 are grasped. “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 harsh 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 bears answers this question as 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.