No Bears

The first scene in No Bears works, like the rest of the film, as a game of mirrors. A couple talk about their new passports, with which they will finally be able to cross towards European lands, when all of a sudden, the artifice is revealed—everything we see onscreen is a sequence being shot, distantly and through a computer, by Jafar Panahi himself. The labels of documentary or fiction —or the intersection between them— are of no interest to the Iranian director—he is making movies. In his new feature, he assumes an artistic and political challenge even greater than the one in This Is Not a Film (2011) or Taxi (2015), traveling to the Turkish border when he’s not allowed to leave the country. With his usual narrative freedom, Panahi allows himself to reflect on the power of cinema as he exposes his own fears as well as his characters’.