‘No Bears’ but there is a lion in captivity

Iran confines a hero of filmmaking, but his movie’s been released — and it is 2022’s best.

Early on in “No Bears,” his brilliant, furious and despairing new movie, the Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi draws a line in the sand. Under cover of darkness, Panahi, here playing a semi-fictional version of himself, arrives on a hill near Iran’s northwestern edge, so close that he can see the lights of a Turkish city beckoning from a short distance.

The temptation to cross over is unmistakable; his colleague (Reza Heydari) urges him to do it, assuring him, with an almost Mephistophelian impishness, that no harm will befall him. But Panahi refuses. Realizing that he is in fact standing on the border itself, he backs away as though stung, unable or unwilling to embrace the freedom that has slipped all too briefly into view.

It’s a piercing moment, not least because the real Panahi has, since 2010, been forbidden to leave or travel outside his home country. His situation has only worsened in recent months: In July he was arrested and imprisoned, not long before mass protests erupted across Iran and fueled the country’s most sustained wave of civil unrest in years.

“No Bears,” first shown in September at the Venice International Film Festival, was completed well before those events began. But like most of Panahi’s movies, it is preternaturally attuned to the systemic realities — misogyny, rigid traditionalism, religious fundamentalism — that set this and other Iranian protest movements in motion.

With Panahi now serving

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes

Playing: Starts Friday at Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles