"You leave feeling like you’ve just seen a truly extraordinary late work produced by one of the era’s greatest working auteurs, quickly followed by the sense of experiencing a sucker punch." Rolling Stone

Venice Film Festival
Toronto International Film Festival
New York Film Festival

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 his oppression at the hands of the Iranian government. Now, Panahi has gifted us all with a new virtuosic sleight-of-hand. In No Bears, as in many of his recent titles, Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself, in this case relocated to a rural border town to remotely direct a new film in nearby Turkey - the story of which comes to sharply mirror disturbing events that begin to occur around him. As he struggles to complete his film, Panahi finds himself thrust in the middle of a local scandal, confronting the opposing pulls of tradition and progress, city and country, belief and evidence, and the universal desire to reject oppression.

Iran - 2022 - 1h 47m
Written By: Jafar Panahi
Directed By: Jafar Panahi
Starring: Jafar Panahi, Naser Hashemi, Vahid Mobaseri