Jafar Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself, who has relocated to a rural border town in Iran to remotely direct a new film in nearby Turkey. While there, he finds himself thrust in the middle of a local scandal, confronting the opposing pulls of tradition and progress.

Clandestinely shot in an open defiance of censorship, Jafar Pahani’s crowning masterpiece probes the power–and the limitations–of cinema in a culture ruled by fear. Railing against the forbidding rigidity of physical as well as ideological borders, No Bears is a miraculous work of political dissent.