No Bears: dir Jafar Panahi (2022)

The jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi plays a version of himself, forced to shoot his new film in a village near the Turkish border whose inhabitants are encouraged to be scared of supposed “bears” roaming the countryside – just as the Iranian people are supposed to be afraid of their morality police … There’s a convoluted plot that mixes reality with the story being film, but ultimately No Bears taps into an Iranian movie-making strategy based on the need to evade censorship with complexity and ambiguity in tackling contemporary political issues. Recommended.

In Turkish, Persian, and Azerbaijani with English subtitles.

This film screens in the sixth edition of the Manarat’s CinemaMAS film festival, curated this time by filmmaker and visual artist Scandar Copti – head of the Film and New Media program at NYU Abu Dhabi from 2014 to 2017. Currently, he is still teaching filmmaking at NYUAD while working on an upcoming feature film.

Individual films on weekdays are AED 30 per head, weekends are AED 50 per day, and there’s an all-inclusive ticket at AED 150.