When? jafar panahi completed his new movie, ‘No Bears’I already knew that I would not be able to attend the premiere in Mostra, because Iranian justice bans travel abroad by 2030; What she didn’t know was that some of her collaborators were going to wear it while walking the festival’s red carpet on Friday. 52 days behind bars. But when you think about it, maybe he was aware of it. After all, if the feature film that could now earn her the Golden Lion once again is too devastating – she has already won the award thanks to ‘El Círculo’ (2000), a devastating indictment of the plight of women in her country. – in good condition because amazing prophetic work.
According to Iranian officials, imprisoning Panahi amounts to the execution of the six-year prison sentence handed down to him in 2010. Organizing propaganda against the Ayatollah’s regimeand it was originally canceled. Despite being sentenced to 20 years of filmmaking, scriptwriting and a ban on leaving his country, for the last 12 years – ‘This Is Not a Movie’ (2011), ‘Pardé’ (2013 ), ‘Taxi Teheran’ (2015, ‘Three Hundred’ ( 2018)- neither fiction nor documentary, and the oppressive personal context, social and political, in which they were created with great mastery as they question their own nature and the cinema itself; ‘No Bears’ builds on the same premise and takes more than most titles before it.
stealth shooting
He plays Panahi himself, he plays himself. we see it Hidden in a small town in Turkeyis directing a film shot in Istanbul from afar. He plans to sneak into the neighboring country, the characters in the story he shoots are an Iranian couple trying to escape to Europe and the actors who play them are in the same situation; everyone wants to escape from iran. And during his stay in that border village, Panahi’s need to use his camera will push him into an increasingly violent confrontation with local customs, which will only serve to perpetuate it. superstitious, ridiculous and stupid masculinity. Considering all this, ‘No Bear’ stands as one of the author’s most complex works, as it adds extraordinary doses of anger and sharp pessimism to conceptual complexity. If Panahi has shown in the past his belief that his cinema can contribute to his salvation and that of his fellow citizens, he now seems convinced that it will only contribute to his faith. We call it prophecy.
Until the moment of its premiere in the competition, ‘No to Bears’ on the winners list was considered a gesture of solidarity with the director; now, its overwhelming artistic merits demand it. Unless Julianne Moore and the rest of the jury she chairs lose their cases, none of this final day’s entries should be among the winning films: not even an Iranian movie. ‘Beyond the wall’the mix of melodrama and suspense is as difficult as it is clumsy, and its presence in the competition is understood only as a political stance taken by the festival; nor french ‘Les miens’, a family comedy overwhelmed by the heavy metaphor it carries; nor italian ‘Cira’The Clare of Assisi biography is far less interesting than the Wikipedia page dedicated to the character.
Although both are among the favourites, since they are both great movies, Possibilities of ‘Blonde’ and ‘Almas en pena en Inisherin’ facing the Golden Lion may be rejected; the first is a divisive work – in any case, the jury should reward the heroine, Ana de Armas – and the second exudes a masculinity unrelated to the ‘zeitgeist’. This historian bets on victory. ‘tar’It’s a film carefully crafted to win awards knowing that Jafar Panahi has a good chance of avoiding it.