Bakhtiar Panjeei

One of the world's great cinema artists, Jafar Panahi has been carefully crafting self-reflexive works about artistic, personal, and political freedom for the past three decades, despite being banned from filmmaking by the Iranian government since 2010. In No Bears completed shortly before his imprisonment in 2022, Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself, a dissident filmmaker who relocates to a rural border town to direct a film remotely...