No Bears. 2022. Iran. Directed by Jafar Panahi. In Farsi, Azerbaijani, Turkish; English subtitles. 107 min.
For members at the Explore category and above, tickets will become available two weeks before the screening date, starting at 10:30 a.m. Additional tickets will be available to members and the general public one week before the screening date, also at 10:30 a.m. Please note that space is extremely limited and tickets will be in high demand.
Jafar Panahi (This Is Not a Film, Closed Curtain, Taxi Tehran) is currently serving a six-year prison sentence in Iran for supporting dissident protests against the repressive clerical regime of Ali Khamenei (as is fellow filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof). In the past four months alone, the world has witnessed the indiscriminate state-led killing and imprisonment of hundreds of artists, human rights activists, students, and other peaceful protesters—many of them women and children—following the murder of Mahsa Ahmini while in the custody of the so-called Morality Police. It is amid this grim reality that Panahi has somehow, miraculously, continued to create new work, both in film and writing. It is equally miraculous that his most recent hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, No Bears, is completely devoid of self-pity or blind rage. Instead, Panahi’s complex, resonant, and absurdist depiction of artistic creativity at any cost considers the political and ethical consequences of making images that affect the lives of others, whether (in this case) a pair of illicit lovers in a patriarchal border village or actors attempting to flee the country with forged passports.