No Bears

One of the world’s great cinematic artists, Jafar Panahi has been carefully crafting self-reflexive works about artistic, personal, and political freedom for the past three decades, despite being banned from filmmaking by the Iranian government since 2010. In NO BEARS—completed shortly before his imprisonment in 2022—Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself, a dissident filmmaker who relocates to a rural border town to direct a film remotely in nearby Turkey and finds himself embroiled in a local scandal. As he struggles to complete his film, Panahi must confront the opposing pulls of tradition and progress, city and country, belief and evidence, and the universal desire to reject oppression.

Starring Jafar Panahi, Naser Hashemi, Vahid Mobaseri, Bakhtiar Panjei, Mina Kavani, Narjes Delaram, Reza Heydari, Javad Siyahi, Yousef Soleymani, Amir Davari, Darya Alei, Rahim Abbasi, Sinan Yusufoglu, Ehsan Ahmad Khanpour, Iman Bazyar