The film is also set to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and New York Film Festival.
Incarcerated Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has won a Special Jury Prize at the 79th edition of the Venice International Film Festival for his film No Bears, in which he plays the protagonist.
Panahi, who won the top prize, Golden Lion, in Venice in 2000, was jailed in July along with two other filmmakers during the latest crackdown on Iranian civil society.
The drama follows two parallel love stories in which the partners are thwarted by hidden, inevitable obstacles, the force of superstition, and the mechanics of power.
As he has done previously, Panahi plays himself in the film, stationed in a village where he remotely directs a crew shooting a film just miles away, on the other side of the Iranian border in Turkey.
It marks Panahi’s first fiction film since the road movie 3 Faces, which won the best screenplay in the Competition at Cannes in 2018.
Panahi directed and produced the film with cast members including Iranian actors Naser Hashemi, Vahid Mobasseri, Bakhtiyar Panjeei and Mina Kavani.
The Iranian director has spent the past 12 years in and out of house arrest, banned from travelling or making films outside Iran and faced with numerous obstacles making films at home.
