'No Bears': autofiction at the border

Jafar Panahi’s 2022 film, now streaming in India, continues the director's recent style, but ina more sombre mood

- Uday Bhatia

Zara (Mina Kavani) is attending to customers at the Turkish café she works in when she gets a call. She runs to meet a gaunt, tense man, Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjeei). They speak in Farsi. He shows her a fake passport he has arranged for her, so she can go to Europe. They have crossed borders illegally before he tells her this time there will be "no risk, no danger, no death". But Zara is upset that Bakhtiar is sending her off without arranging a passport for himself. She runs back into the café, leaving him to fret and smoke outside. The camera pans back to him-this has all been one shot and then a new face pops up in front of the lens. "How was it?" he asks. The next shot reveals the person being addressed, Iranian director Jafar Panahi.

In three of the four feature films he made before No Bears (2022), Panahi presided as a mostly genial master of ceremonies. This Is Not A Film (2011) was made in reaction to the restrictions placed on him by the Iranian government in 2010: house arrest, no travel abroad, no directing or writing scripts. It showed Panahi in his apartment, talking about planned scenes, conferring with associates all the while insisting he isn't directing. The satire was extended in Taxi (2015) where, his restrictions relaxed somewhat, Panahi drives around Tehran talking to "passengers" ranging from his DVD supplier to activist Nasrin Sotoudeh. 3 Faces (2018) pushed the boundaries further-Panahi and actress Behnaz Jafari travelling to a village to try and help a young woman.