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No Bears

No Bears

6,9 /10 (135 Votes)
2022 FA 107 min

Overview

Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has been barred from leaving the country, arrives at a village on the Iran-Turkey border to supervise a film based on a real-life couple seeking passports to Europe being shot in Turkey, but both his stay and the production run into trouble.

Stream

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Release date

06/10/2022

Votes

135

Popularity

3.2

Genres

Status

Released

Original title

خرس نیست

Language

FA

Runtime

107 min

Revenue

$1,067,495

Original Soundtrack

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CinemaSerf

CinemaSerf

2022-11-17

⭐ 6

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 …

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B

badelf

2026-07-17

⭐ 9

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, continuin…

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