No Be­ars

This time Jafar Panahi is shooting a film in Turkey about a couple who want to flee to France with fake passports. But how does the Iranian director, who is banned from working and is not allowed to leave the country, manage to do this? Panahi has withdrawn to a province near the Iranian-Turkish border and gives instructions to his assistant director over a highly unstable internet connection. At night they meet secretly to hand over the hard drive with the latest footage. But Panahi's films are always multidimensional. As before, he skilfully weaves fiction and reality here too, because the rural village is also the setting for a fictional story - about a director who tries to continue his work as a filmmaker despite state repression. Although he behaves inconspicuously so as not to be identified and reported to the authorities, he gets into trouble because of a photo he supposedly took. He is said to have photographed a couple in love, but the young man was not the fiancé to whom the girl is promised. Soon the whole village is turned upside down. Panahi's autobiographical experiences and the conditions under which his work was created are also a central motif in "No Bears". He has thus found an impressive, if dangerous, way to fight for the freedom of artistic creation in Iran. In addition, "No Bears" is a multi-layered parable about the oppressive standstill of a society and the panicked rejection of change: in the city under the pressure of the authorities, in the village in the shackles of superstition. How do you make art to move society to change when it doesn't want it? "No Bears" returns to this question again and again, quietly despairing of the world. The film won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival, and Jafar Panahi himself was imprisoned again in July. Director: Jafar Panahi
Film genre: Drama
Access age / Recommended age: 16 (16)
Country of production: Iran (2022)
Duration: 108'
Cast: Jafar Panahi, Mina Kavani, Vahid Mobasheri, Bülent Keser, Naser Hashemi, Sinan Yusufoglu