No Bears is the latest movie from celebrated Iranian director and democracy campaigner Jafar Panahi, who has also directed This Is Not a Film and Taxi Tehran. This nuanced piece of film making is set in a rural village, where the residents have had a fear of bears inculcated in them, as a way of controlling their freedom of movement. (Panahi was recently arrested and sentenced to six years in prison after long periods of house arrest.)
There are no bears in the village or in the movie, but the metaphor is what Panahi employs to stand in for Iran’s “morality police”. Panahi plays a film director who is forbidden to make films at home and who goes to a small Turkish town just over the border with Iran. The movie stars an Iranian couple, Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjei) and Zara (Mia Khosravani) and is based on their true-life ordeal of trying to escape Iran.
Panaji pretends he is there to photograph a wedding, which the locals go along with. But he becomes embroiled in a drama not of his making, when the woman who is supposed to undergo the arranged marriage has a change of heart and is in love with someone else. She becomes convinced that Panaji has photographed her with her illicit lover in a secret meeting and the untrue rumor escalates. Panahi does not believe he took such a photo, but the whole drama has eerie parallels with his own life: he is filming when he is forbidden from doing so and now is also now accused of filming something forbidden.
The village is in such an uproar over this rumor takes on a life of its own and he confronted by the village elders who want to confiscate this photo.
No Bears is another example of Iranian film makers evading censorship in order to make movies, by using ambiguity and metaphor to tackle contemporary political issues.  Given the uprising which has been taking place by Iranian women, No Bears is a not-so-subtle dig at the Iranian authorities control and censorship.