Janus Films revealed the official US trailer No Bears (خرس نیست), the Iranian drama directed by imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. The film which was secretly filmed in Iran, stars Panahi along with Naser Hashemi, Vahid Mobaseri, Bakhtiyar Panjei, Mina Kavani, and Reza Heydari, and tells two parallel love stories in which the lovers struggle with hidden and unavoidable obstacles.
No Bears world premiered at the 79th Venice Film Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize; and will be released in theaters in NY only on December 23rd, 2022, then expand to LA and other cities in 2023.
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, as the international film community vehemently denounces his summer 2022 arrest and continued imprisonment for his vocal support of a fellow artist’s independence, 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.
Watch the official US trailer for No Bears.