No Bears

11/17/2022

Film director Jafar Panahi is prohibited from leaving Iran, but is trying to make a film in neighbouring Turkey. In order to make that work, he moves to a remote village near the border, where the communications are a bit hit and miss. With the help of his obliging host "Ghanbar" (Vahid Mobaseri), though, he tries to make the best of it. Initially, it's a friendly village but when he takes (or doesn't!) a photograph of a young couple, he finds himself drawn into an increasingly acrid stand-off between two young men, and their families, to whom a girl may have been betrothed when her umbilical cord was cut. His frustrations with these encroachments are not helped by production difficulties with the two two stars of his documentary-style film - real life lovers who are trying to find a way t

7/17/2026

Summary: 9/10: Panahi's defiant meta-documentary exposes the mechanics of authoritarian control through the lens of village superstition, proving that Iran's attempt to silence one of its greatest filmmakers has only made his voice more essential. It's a small miracle that this film exists at all. In 2010, Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison; and a 20-year ban on filmmaking, writing screenplays, and international travel by Iranian authorities for what they called "making propaganda against the system." He made films anyway, smuggling them out of Iran on USB sticks, continuing to work in defiance of a regime determined to silence him. In 2022, shortly after completing this film, he was arrested again and detained for seven months before being released following a hunger s