No Bears

The fifth film Jafar Panahi has made in secret since he was banned in 2010 from directing and from leaving the country. Panahi plays a fictionalised version of himself. He has settled in a village on the Turkish border and is directing a film remotely, over the internet, on the other side of it. In that film a couple is trying to reach Europe on forged passports. In the village, trouble arises over a photograph he took: the villagers believe it shows a girl and a boy together, and they want the picture handed over. Both strands are tied to the same question: whatever the camera sees becomes true, and whose interest does that serve. Panahi interrogates his own position too; the director inside the film is using the lives of people across the border for his own work. It won the Special Jury Prize at Venice in 2022. Panahi was in prison at the time: he was arrested on 11 July 2022 while at the prosecutor's office following the cases of two colleagues, and began serving a six-year sentence handed down more than a decade earlier. He was released in February 2023 after a hunger strike. An important work for anyone interested in Iranian cinema and in films that think about cinema. The pace is slow and the connection between the strands is deliberately late.