No Bears

Prohibited by the government from making films and from leaving Iran, owing to his politically critical movies, filmmaker Jafar Panahi — playing a fictionalized version of himself — has rented a room at the village of Jaban, near Turkey's border, where he is remotely directing a docudrama about an Iranian couple, Bakhtiar and Zara, who are attempting to secure fake passports so they can flee the country after years of government abuse. Bakhtiar has successfully acquired a passport for Zara but couldn't get one for himself, which distresses Zara. While watching the sequence through a livestream on his computer, Panahi loses connection and is cut out. Panahi wraps up for the day and goes out to photograph the village.