Iran/2022—directed by Jafar Panahi | 107 minutes

One of the world’s great filmmakers, Iranian director Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, Taxi, 3 Faces – all screened at DFT) won the 2022 Venice Film Festival Jury Prize for this new, clandestinely-shot, brilliantly complex meta-drama about a filmmaker (Panahi) who temporarily relocates to an Iranian border town to remotely oversee the making of a new film in Turkey.

Though it begins playfully as a film-within-a-film, Panahi soon finds himself involved in a controversy with local villagers when he’s accused of taking a photograph of an unmarried couple, leading to larger clashes between tradition and progress, city and country, spiritual belief and photographic evidence, as well as the human desire to escape oppression.

No Bears is receiving worldwide theatrical release and critical praise, even as the international film community denounces Panahi’s summer 2022 arrest, resulting in a 6-year prison sentence for “collusion against the regime.” In Farsi, Azerbaijani, and Turkish with English subtitles. 

“An instantly gripping, formally ingenious drama… about the ways people weaponize fear in order to hide their own.”        – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times