On demand: "No Bears"

Good news for those of us keeping an eye on these developments: Jafar Panahi is on the move again (sort of). 2022's No Bears, Panahi's most recent dispatch on life inside Iran and on the conditions to which he himself has been made subject, serves as an unpacking of how this director's films now have to be made following his censure by the authorities: on the hoof, under cover, most of all remotely. The Panahi we see on camera has travelled from Tehran to a village on the Turkish border - perhaps for a recce, perhaps for reasons besides - while simultaneously overseeing the shooting of a docufiction about two lovers fleeing the country on counterfeit passports; Panahi's crew, both back in the city and out in the sticks, wonder whether maestro is opening the door to an escape of his own. Caution must be exercised. Hence Panahi does most of his direction over a laptop, at some plausibly deniable remove from the work that he's creating. There are problems with this: the laptop falls victim to connectivity issues, the filmmaker's hosts keep intervening and interrupting, and handing your camera to others doesn't always get you the shots you want. Sometimes, indeed, it gets you shots you weren't expecting; you get taken in a different direction. This process of being out in the world is often as despair-inducing as it is surprising. A scene of celebration will be returned to, late on, as a site of mourning. The subjects of the film-within-a-film, themselves weighing up whether to fight or fly, fight battles of their own. At a critical point in No Bears, they're even observed to turn against Panahi, lambasting him for forcing them to hit their marks and stay in place. One of many things Iranian films and filmmakers have mastered since their international breakthrough at the turn of the 1990s: erasing the fine line separating drama from documentary, and thereby folding in the circumstances of their own making.

Even so, No Bears - being this creative's strongest and boldest statement for some while - pushes further still. Those movies Panahi teased out while under house arrest in Tehran were comparatively comforting: they stayed close to home by jurisdictional necessity, and were informed as much as anything by the laughable absurdity of the situation their maker found himself in. Here, though, we're out on the fringes of Iranian society, where the jackals and coyotes roam, and a large part of No Bears' palpable tension stems from our understanding that Panahi himself may actually be weighing up whether to run for Western cover, and what the consequences would be for him and his film. Should I stay or should I go? It's not just that the onscreen Panahi is operating far from his usual comfort zone, it's that he's spiritually out of place: a figure of modernity - touting camera, laptop and rationality, prescribing magnesium tablets for a neighbour's joint issues - in a Stone Age landscape still governed by the old ways, traditions and superstitions, talk of djinns and of bears. In a further complication, his hosts want to use his pictures - or pictures they believe he's taken - to settle a contentious local matter, and so he soon finds his own imagemaking being put on trial again. Once more, we might wonder how much of this derives from lived experience, and how much constitutes the filmmaker's worst fears.

Either way, the diagnosis this involving and finally gripping film ventures is of a widespread inability to let people be - a social failure, we note, which extends some measure beyond the filmmaker's immediate purview. It's no coincidence that the film-within-the-film - the film Panahi is seen directing remotely - concerns the struggles of those seeking room to move; no coincidence, either, that these scenes have been shot on backstreets that could as easily pass for bohemian London, Paris or New York as they do Tehran. Panahi permits himself room for another self-portrait, though it's hardly what you'd call a flattering one: older and sadder than the larky DIY auteur who thrashed out This is Not a Film, cursed with a smoker's cough from the cigarettes he feels obliged to light up at moments of stress, this Panahi is a man at the mercy of the powers-that-be, who sees no resolution to his conflict with the State and no sign of any improvement for those seeking personal or creative freedom. (Encoded within these extraordinary films: a sense of frustration at how much better the filmmaking could be if these projects didn't entail so much hush-hush and other hassle.) In No Bears' closing movement, Panahi brings everything close to home once more - the alarm bells are going off; there's finally nothing remote about what we see - leaving us to ponder how a film made thousands of miles away, in defiance of the most oppressive conditions, can offer a clearer line of sight on developments in the wider world than 95% of films made under so-called functioning liberal democracy.

No Bears is currently streaming via the BBC iPlayer; it is also available to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, the BFI Player and YouTube.