That Panahi was arrested shortly after completing the film and that he is now serving out the six-year prison sentence originally handed down in 2010 in Tehran’s infamous Ervin Prison is an irony that would have been out of place in all of his work until the stark horror of No Bears.
The death of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish Iranian woman who died after being taken into police custody, has sparked mass protests in Iran and in other cities and countries.