No Bears unfolds in the same way. The initial mystery is so gripping that the technical intricacies of the film only reveal themselves after multiple viewings. Early in the film, Panahi’s character lends his camera to Ghanbar, a villager who is about to attend a pre-wedding ceremony. The man, inexperienced with technology, mistakenly turns the camera off when he means to record, mostly recording what he meant to leave out. The mask of civility quickly slips as the unsavory speculation, gossip, and insults recorded to Panahi’s SD card reveal what the villagers really think of him.
Through meticulous adherence to the “Show, don’t tell” rule of filmmaking, Panahi never lectures us, but we quickly understand that the “nasty” parts, meant to happen when the camera isn’t rolling, are the closest representation of the unfiltered truth we’ll ever see.
“Something weird happened. We worked in [Jaban] for about 6 sessions before the police came to chase us away. For the scene where [Panahi] goes to the top of the mountain near the border, our only lighting was moonlight. We couldn’t direct artificial light onto [the actors] for fear of being seen. We filmed that sequence in two and a half hours.” —Amin Jafari
With the background given to me by Amin Jafari during the interview, I realized that the cast and crew of No Bears faked very little. They all faced arrest. They were all in the line of fire while filming in smuggler-controlled territory. Still, to them, the authenticity of their work isn’t beyond question. This isn’t Woody Allen’s “self-deprecation.” Panahi is directly challenging the core tenet of his filmography, realism, in a way that makes us realize how easily truth can be distorted into a phony mirror image of itself. When Panahi shoots, he shoots to kill, even when he’s the target. He is acutely aware that melodrama elevates the mundane as much as it cheapens the truth.
In a key scene, Panahi’s character is called out by one of the actresses in his film-within-a-film, who angrily accuses him of tainting his films with faux-optimism. Standing in an alley, facing us, the selcouth Mina Kavani delivers her lines with a piercing gaze. Her eyes are not drenched in fake tears. Cars zoom by, making just enough noise to complement the urban soundscape, entirely undisturbed by her suffering.