When the Iranian director Jafar Panahi showed up at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, it struck some of us as something close to a miracle. For most of the past 15 years, since he was arrested in 2010 and charged with making anti-government propaganda, Panahi had been forbidden to travel outside Iran. He’d also been banned from making movies, though he got around that restriction with great ingenuity and continued to shoot films in secret.

But then, in 2022, Panahi was arrested again and imprisoned. When he announced, seven months later, that he was beginning a hunger strike, many of us feared it would end with his death. Instead, he was released after two days and has been free to travel ever since.

In ‘No Bears’, a banned filmmaker takes bold aim at Iranian society

In 2010

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