Venice Review: Jafar Panahi’s ‘No Bears’

Manori Ravindran International Editor Imprison Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s “No Bears” has sold into North America, with Sideshow and Janus Films acquiring U.S. rights, and Films We Like buying the movie for Canada. “No Bears,” which premiered earlier this month at the Venice Film Festival, portrays two parallel love stories. “In both, the lovers are troubled by hidden, inevitable obstacles, the force of superstition and the mechanics of power,” reads an official synopsis. The film is written, produced, and directed by Panahi, and stars Panahi, Naser Hashemi, Vahid Mobaseri, Bakhtiar Panjei, Mina Kavani, Narjes Dalaram and Reza Heydari.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi remains behind bars in Tehran but his cinema continues to travel.

arrested by Iranian authorities after he had inquired about the status of two other detained Iranian directors. The government has now forced him to serve out a six-year jail sentence originally issued to Panahi in December 2010. At that time, he was banned for 20 years from directing movies, writing screenplays or giving any form of interview with an Iranian or foreign press, though he has since showcased other films such as “This Is Not a Film,” “Closed Curtain,” “Taxi” and “3 Faces” in defiance of his order and state-attempted censorship.

Houman Seyyedi’s darkly comic drama World War III has been named as Iran’s entry for Best International Feature at the 95th Academy Awards, taking place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on March 12th, 2023.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Iranian actor Leila Hatami, best known outside her country for her role in Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning “A Separation,” will soon be back on international movie screens in Iranian-British director Mehdi Norowzian’s metaphysical drama “A Time in Eternity” which recently wrapped in Iran. “There isn’t one scene without me,” Hatami told Variety, speaking on the sidelines of the just concluded Venice Film Festival where she was a member of the main jury. The London-based Norowzian, who was Oscar-nominated for his 1999 short “Killing Joe” and subsequently directed Joseph Fiennes, Elizabeth Shue, Dennis Hopper and Sam Shepherd in the 2002 drama “Leo,” has since become a prominent commercials director. Norowzian recently returned to Iran to shoot this film, which is his first feature after two decades.

A Syrian war film with a difference, Nezouh is a delicate and engrossing entry in Venice’s Horizons Extra section. Director Soudade Kaadan won Lion of the Future for 2018’s The Day I Lost My Shadow, and she continues to impress with this empathetic story of life under siege. 

Ben Croll Venice’s red carpet became a stage for quiet protest on Friday, as festival director Alberto Barbera and jury president Julianne Moore, among many more, held a somber walk-out to stand in solidarity with imprisoned filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Traffic on the red carpet flowed normally as attendees made their way into Venice’s Palazzo del Cinema for the world premiere of Panahi’s latest film, “No Bears.” And then, at 4:30 pm sharp, the doors to the theater swung open and a sea of people filed out. Moore stood with a delegation that also included fellow juror Audrey Diwan, Horizons jury president Isabel Coixet, and filmmakers Laura Bispuri and Sally Potter.

Venice jury head Julianne Moore joined activists from the International Coalition Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR) in a flash mob on the Venice red carpet Friday evening to call for the release of Jafar Panahi, the Iranian director who was detained in Tehran in July.

Jessica Kiang 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 even include the director’s own tendency toward playfulness in its critique. If Panahi’s dissident films have to date been journeys of discovery about the subversively liberating, life-affirming power of cinema, “No Bears” is where he slams on the brakes. 

Jessica Kiang Nobody emerges unscathed — least of all the audience — from Vahid Jalilvand’s highly effective, deeply unpleasant “Beyond the Wall,” a morbidly violent allegory for the effects of state-sponsored trauma on the individual that places contemporary Iranian society somewhere on the map between the sixth and seventh circles of hell. A strange combination of intricate, almost sci-fi-inflected psychological thriller, splenetic social-breakdown broadside and two-hander (torture) chamber drama, it is an exercise in bravura filmmaking applied to a story so relentlessly grim you might wish it were a little less well-made, giving you an excuse to look away. In his 2017 film “No Date No Signature” (which won Best Director and Best Actor in Venice’s Horizons sidebar), Jalilvand pictured a stratified society teetering on the edge of legality and morality; here, however, it has toppled entirely into the abyss. The only way is down, and the filmmaker is bringing you with it.

A powerful meditation on recent history, In Viaggio premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Directed by previous Golden Lion winner Gianfranco Rosi, it follows the travels of Pope Francis, using mostly archival footage to paint not just a picture of the man, but of the modern world.

Korea’s Busan International Film Festival (October 5-14) has announced its full line-up, including opening film Scent Of Wind, directed by Iran’s Hadi Mohaghegh, while Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai will be honoured as Asian Filmmaker Of The Year.

Anna Tatarska Arian Vazirdaftari, whose debut feature “Without Her” (“Bi roya”) was picked up by Berlin-based sales company Picture Tree Intl. and is screening as part of Venice Film Festival’s Horizons Extra section, is no stranger to international festivals. He was a part of Berlinale Talent Campus and his short films screened in Busan, Brussels and Cannes among many others. “I started as a self-taught filmmaker and only landed in film school many years later,” Vazirdaftari says. “My international experiences really helped. I got to know a more professional atmosphere globally, learned about what’s going on in film festivals, how films are selected and distributed.

An eccentric 20-something tries to make friends in Amanda, a first feature for Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli. Premiering in Venice’s Horizons Extra section, it’s a comical, stylized character portrait with a strong central turn from Benedetta Porcaroli. 

I never start a review commenting on whatever the so-called Film Twitter Mafia have to say about it, sight unseen. Starting back at CinemaCon in April when its directo/co-star Olivia Wilde was served legal papers onstage regarding her custody hearings with ex Jason Sudeikis, there has been non-stop gossip about her movie Don’t Worry Darling. There has been so much of it, right up to today’s Venice Film Festival press conference (covered by my colleague Nancy Tartaglione) that you almost have to address the elephant in the room. Others can do that, but let us not forget there is also a movie here, one I was able to preview as just that a few weeks ago in Burbank. As a reviewer, to quote Being There’s Chauncey Gardner, “I like to watch,” and that means only what is on the screen.

Playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh is up to more deliciously fiendish tricks in The Banshees of Inisherin, a simple and diabolical tale of a friendship’s end shot through with bristling humor and sudden moments of startling violence. It world premieres in competition at the Venice Film Festival Monday. Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and the small handful of supporting players make the most of the author’s vibrant prose in McDonagh’s first film since Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri five years ago.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Iranian cinema is having a great year despite the many impediments film directors face there, including being jailed. Reflecting this burst of irrepressible cinematic energy, after strong showing of Iranian cinema at Berlin, Cannes and Karlovy Vary, Venice has five films from the country, two of which are in competition. Also, Leila Hatami, star of Cannes festival jurist Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation,” is a member of Venice’s main jury panel. “We have never received so many submissions from Iran, and many of them are good,” says Venice chief Alberto Barbera. He notes that “the paradox is that this is happening at a time when the Iranian regime is among the most rigidly conservative and repressive in the world,” and is responding to uprisings sparked by the country’s harsh economic conditions by re-incarcerating directors such as Jafar Panahi, whose latest film “No Bears” launches from Venice, fellow dissident filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, and others “who try to freely express their opposing points of view.”

Who would have thought that, of all the top-shelf auteurs in Venice’s big comeback year, the most constrained would be Darren Aronofsky? His new competition film The Whale opens with that very intent — the screen is cropped to 1:33 — which turns out to be most appropriate for a small and intimate movie about a very big man.

detained by the Iranian government last month. Rasoulof, who is the director of the Berlin Golden Bear winner “There Is No Evil,” was arrested alongside fellow filmmaker Mostafa Aleahmad for posting on social media and participating in protests over a building that had collapsed in the city of Abadan in May.

A panel of international figures joined forces today at the Venice Festival to pledge their support for filmmakers suffering oppression, harassment and imprisonment around the world.