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. “Over a decade ago, in 2010, Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison and a twenty-year ban on directing films. He has, in the time since, directed five features; the unfathomable difficulty of this feat is as astonishing as how vital and how good his work continues to be. NO BEARS may be the best of them all.”—Alison Willmore, “Vulture” “Don’t miss NO BEARS . . . An act of profound resistance.”—Manohla Dargis, “The New York Times” “A masterwork . . . Panahi once again uses his situation to produce something that’s somehow life-affirming and deeply devastating.”—David Fear, “Rolling Stone” “Brilliant . . . Instantly gripping, formally ingenious.”—Justin Chang, “Los Angeles Times” “Jafar Panahi may be the most vital and courageous filmmaker in the world right now.”—Jake Coyle, “Associated Press”