No Bears

Iranian maestro Jafar Panahi once again defies the forces of oppression, playing a filmmaker whose latest production mirrors his own reality.

For the last decade, Jafar Panahi has made a series of boldly inventive statements defying the Iranian government’s ban on his being an active filmmaker. As he faces six years imprisonment, his latest film is testimony to how artistry and protest can find inspiration in the very restrictions that he and other creative voices face. Panahi plays himself, a filmmaker trying to direct a cast and crew in Turkey, who is forced to remain in an Iranian village close to the border. As his actors perform their own story of attempted escape to Europe, Panahi finds himself coming up against suspicion and local traditions.

Arguably the filmmaker’s richest and most complex work to date, No Bears is a witty, serio-comic self-portrait, and a resounding act of artistic and political expression.