Are there good men – with their wives – in Afghanistan? This is the question posed with “naive optimism” by the opening film of the Berlinale, against the backdrop of the return to power of the Taliban authorities in 2021.
“Yes, there are” but “we need more,” replied Shahrbanoo Sadat at a press conference on Thursday, short hair, jacket and dark glasses.
An Afghan exiled in Germany, she is both the director and the main actress of “No Good Men”, in which she plays a video journalist who, through contact with the star reporter of her editorial team, will reconsider her disillusioned vision of the opposite sex.
The director of the Berlinale, Tricia Tuttle, praised at a press conference the work of “one of the most unique voices to have emerged from Afghan cinema”.
For Shahrbanoo Sadat, opening the 76th Berlinale is an unexpected spotlight for an Afghanistan told by its own inhabitants.
“For a very, very long time, Afghan stories were told by foreign filmmakers and so there was always a form of distortion,” she said in an interview with AFP.
Just the fact of “creating an Afghan character” requires “reflection” for the “young cinema” of the country devastated by decades of war, she underlines.
Courageous to the point of recklessness, Naru, focused on the influence of a patriarchal society, does not see the disaster that is beginning, with the American withdrawal and the Kabul airport soon overwhelmed by Afghans desperate to flee.
These painful scenes are directly inspired by Shahrbanoo Sadat’s own experience, forced to flee with the return of the Taliban authorities and who now lives in Hamburg.
“I was at the airport with my family for 72 hours when it all started,” she recalls.
“Because I was there”, the scene was therefore one of the “most difficult” to shoot.
– Touch of lightness –
But the film also surprises by the light touch with which she treats the restrictions imposed on women in her country, described as “gender apartheid” by the UN.
In addition to the scene where Naru is offered a dildo by a friend who returned from the United States, a cactus with a suspiciously phallic appearance at the end of the credits shows its spicy humor to scratch patriarchal attitudes.
The film, which depicts the space that Afghan women were conquering before 2021, both on a personal and professional level, is the work of a “naive optimist”, as Shahrbanoo Sadat likes to define herself.
It contains an element of idealism in its representation of Afghan journalists to whom it is also dedicated, through the tribute to the seven staff members of the popular channel Tolo TV, killed during an attack by Taliban fighters in 2016.
The actress-director, however, did not want to “romanticize the era of democracy” which ended with the return of the Taliban.
“I don’t deny that the Taliban are the biggest problem in Afghanistan today, but on the other hand, it wasn’t all rosy” before, she said, referring to widespread corruption.
– Bypass restrictions-
Due to the constraints of filming in Afghanistan, the film was shot in several locations in northern Germany, with shots interspersed with archive footage from Kabul.
In his thanks, Sadat highlights his “luck” to work in a country which has “one of the largest Afghan communities” in the diaspora.
Getting involved in the casting, she sifted through the mosques, cafes and restaurants frequented by the more than 460,000 Afghans living in Germany.
She has received “thousands of requests” to participate in the film, and some members of the “small community” born from the filming will be present at the premiere on Thursday.
In Afghanistan, the return of a Taliban government has meant strict restrictions on films, music and other entertainment, in accordance with their ultra-rigorous interpretation of Islamic law.
Despite these prohibitions, Ms. Sadat believes that an Afghan audience will watch the film via pirate sites, or cut out on social platforms and networks.
published on February 12 at 6:14 p.m., AFP
date: 2026-02-12 23:18:00