NO BEARS

NO BEARS (KHERS NİST), 2022
Iran| DCP, Color, 106'| Persian, Turkish
Director: Jafar Panahi
Cast: Jafar Panahi, Naser Hashemi, Mina Kavani

Jafar Panahi’s most recent film, which will be showcased in Türkiye for the first time, offers another instance of meta-cinema, closely tied to his personal circumstances of imprisonment. The narrative revolves around the enduring desire of a director, forbidden from both working and leaving his country, to create a film against all odds, a testament to his relentless attempts at producing visuals and narratives… Residing in a border village, Panahi endeavors to remotely direct a love story set on the Turkish – Iranian border involving an exiled Iranian couple - using only a computer and a phone.In the meantime, he inadvertently gets entangled in the village’s local affairs due to a photograph he didn’t actually capture. Through these two intertwined narratives, he explores the minor deceptions and significant injustices perpetuated by his compatriots, all the while introspecting the moral and authoritarian boundaries of his own creative process. The film, as much personal as it is political and as compelling as ever, comes from Panahi, a man trapped between his ingrained habit of immortalizing life through film and his enforced inability to depart from his homeland.