Roise and Frank is, quite simply, a delightfully feel-good, gently funny Irish-language indie with lots of heart. It's no surprise to me the film was a huge hit in Port Townsend when it played at the Port Townsend Film Festival last year, and it’s guaranteed to warm our Bellingham hearts, too. The film follows Roise (pronounced Roh-shuh), a recently widowed, grief-stricken and lonely woman whose life takes a turn when a dog, an apparent stray, turns up on her doorstep and refuses to leave. To the dismay of her practical son, the local medical doctor, Roise begins to believe the dog is her dead husband, Frank, reincarnated and returned to her. And so with Frank at her side, Roise begins to re-engage with the world around her, and, noting another lonely soul, a young boy who wants to join the local children’s Hurling team but is too shy to do so, Roise and Frank take him under their wing.  It's a warm and gentle story about loss and the way that family and community helps to heal that loss, but most of all, it's about how the love of a good dog is better than just about anything and how a wise and loving pet might know exactly what we need when other people don't. And in honor of our Saturday screenings of the film, the Whatcom Humane Society will be joining us in our lobby with a slideshow of adoptable pets available. Adorable animals on a Saturday afternoon -- what could be better?

No Bears is the latest film from the extraordinary Iranian filmmaker, Jafar Panahi, and it is a masterpiece. Some of you may have had the chance to see another Panahi film with us recently for our February Cinema East selection, 3 Faces, and many may remember the harrowing political persecution under which Panahi has been working for most of his career but particularly since 2010, when he was charged with “anti-government propaganda,” sentenced to six years in prison and put under a 20-year ban on directing movies, writing screenplays, giving interviews, or leaving the country. Defiant in the face of these restrictions, Panahi has persisted in his art, making such films as the cheekily-titled This Is Not a Film(2011), Closed Curtain (2013), Taxi (2015), 3 Faces (2018), and now No Bears(2022).

Panahi has made self-reflexive films exploring artistic, personal, and political freedom for most of his career, and this film continues to probe those ideas and to push the boundaries of cinematic expression, while also interrogating the nature and ethics of filmmaking itself. Like many of his earlier films, here, Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself: a filmmaker named Jafar Panahi, who, banned from making films and from leaving the country, has traveled to a small Iranian village bordering Turkey, and from that secret and remote location, is directing a film, which itself is being shot in Turkey. In the midst of the drama of making his secret film--a task complicated by unreliable wifi and an inability to stay in touch with his Turkish crew--Panahi becomes unintentionally embroiled in the local village politics after he takes seemingly innocent photos of the the villagers and the local leaders then insist he hand the photos over in order to prosecute a crime they say has taken place: a love affair between two young people.

What unfolds is a delicately nuanced and layered examination of social and political issues, particularly the gendered oppression and religious fundamentalism of the society, but Panahi doesn’t let himself as a filmmaker off the hook either, and the film examines the dubious ethics, and sometimes even just bumbling mistakes, filmmakers might run into. Ultimately, No Bears is a thematically complex, formally ingenious film, laced with both humor and tragedy; it is, quite simply, a brilliant piece of work.  There are just four chances to see the film, which is not available on any streaming platform, and I’m delighted to say Jeff Purdue, Cinema East programmer, will be here for an introduction to the April 8 Saturday screening at 3:00 pm. You won’t want to miss it!