Jailed director Jafar Panahi plays a version of himself, forced to shoot his new film in a town near the border with Turkey
As Iranian women rise up against their misogynist bullies, this is a good time to watch Jafar Panahi’s latest film, set in a village whose inhabitants are encouraged to be scared of supposed “bears” roaming the countryside – just as the Iranian people are supposed to be afraid of their morality police. No Bears is a complex, mysterious metafiction about the anguish of Iran and the artist working within Iran. Its creator, film-maker and democracy campaigner Panahi, has recently been sentenced to six years in jail after long periods of house arrest since a bogus propaganda charge in 2011.
Panahi plays “Jafar Panahi”, a film director who is forbidden to make films or leave the country. So his new movie is shooting in a small Turkish town just...
As Iranian women rise up against their misogynist bullies, this is a good time to watch Jafar Panahi’s latest film, set in a village whose inhabitants are encouraged to be scared of supposed “bears” roaming the countryside – just as the Iranian people are supposed to be afraid of their morality police. No Bears is a complex, mysterious metafiction about the anguish of Iran and the artist working within Iran. Its creator, film-maker and democracy campaigner Panahi, has recently been sentenced to six years in jail after long periods of house arrest since a bogus propaganda charge in 2011.
Panahi plays “Jafar Panahi”, a film director who is forbidden to make films or leave the country. So his new movie is shooting in a small Turkish town just...
- 11/9/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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Jafar Panahi has spent much time in and out of prison or under house arrest in Iran since 2010 on inflated charges including collusion, propaganda and threatening national security, slapped with a 20-year ban on filmmaking and all non-medical or religious international travel. Over those last 12 years, the elder-statesman auteur has never renounced his right to artistic expression, continuing to make docu-fiction hybrid films with crafty resourcefulness and oblique political and social commentary.
In July, Panahi was again arrested, this time slated to serve an earlier six-year prison sentence that was never enforced, as part of a broader crackdown on independent Iranian cinema. This has sparked outraged condemnation from across the global film community. That incendiary situation inevitably gives his latest work, No Bears (Khers Nist), heightened impact.
But this artful telling of parallel narratives that intersect with Panahi facing the cost to himself...
Jafar Panahi has spent much time in and out of prison or under house arrest in Iran since 2010 on inflated charges including collusion, propaganda and threatening national security, slapped with a 20-year ban on filmmaking and all non-medical or religious international travel. Over those last 12 years, the elder-statesman auteur has never renounced his right to artistic expression, continuing to make docu-fiction hybrid films with crafty resourcefulness and oblique political and social commentary.
In July, Panahi was again arrested, this time slated to serve an earlier six-year prison sentence that was never enforced, as part of a broader crackdown on independent Iranian cinema. This has sparked outraged condemnation from across the global film community. That incendiary situation inevitably gives his latest work, No Bears (Khers Nist), heightened impact.
But this artful telling of parallel narratives that intersect with Panahi facing the cost to himself...
- 9/9/2022
- by David Rooney
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
When the definitive book on dissident filmmaking is written, it will have at least several chapters and a lengthy appendix dedicated to Iran’s Jafar Panahi, who has now covertly made five astonishingly resourceful features since being banned from filmmaking by the Iranian authorities in 2010. But given those circumstances, perhaps the biggest ongoing surprise of his career has been just how lively his illegally shot films have been — even while, as metafictions, they refer continually to the hampered circumstances of their creation.
“No Bears,” which premieres in competition in Venice, certainly starts in that register, with a rugpull or two and handful of seriocomic, absurdist observations on the foibles of Iranian village life. But then, as though it were anticipating the worsening political situation which culminated in Panahi’s detention in July 2022 for a six-year prison sentence, the mood darkens, prior to an ambiguous but devastating finale which seems to...
“No Bears,” which premieres in competition in Venice, certainly starts in that register, with a rugpull or two and handful of seriocomic, absurdist observations on the foibles of Iranian village life. But then, as though it were anticipating the worsening political situation which culminated in Panahi’s detention in July 2022 for a six-year prison sentence, the mood darkens, prior to an ambiguous but devastating finale which seems to...
- 9/9/2022
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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