‘Afghanistan’s first romantic comedy” was not the easiest of sales pitches, director Shahrbanoo Sadat admits. But her long shot of a movie landed her the opening slot at the Berlin film festival starting Thursday, sending her in the red-carpet footsteps of the likes of Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers.
Sadat, 35, wrote, directed and stars in the daring, genre-bending film No Good Men, about a budding love affair in a Kabul newsroom on the eve of the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 and the west’s chaotic withdrawal.
During the years-long gestation of the picture, Sadat found herself stranded on a writing retreat in Germany by the pandemic, then witnessing the febrile last days of democracy in Afghanistan. Finally, she was evacuated to Europe in fear for her life as Kabul fell to the Taliban.
She said those tumultuous years in and out of her homeland shaped the kind of movie she wanted to make – paying tribute to women and men finding joy and connection despite tumult, violence and repression.
“Afghanistan doesn’t have a film industry and it’s always misrepresented by the films that are being made by international film-makers. The only type of film-making that is expected is a war drama,” she said in a video call from Hamburg where she has resettled.
Sadat said that disconnect set her on a unique path as an Afghan director, one that embraced fun and even frank sexuality running counter to western stereotypes. “My life is not a war drama every day. There’s a lot of humour and a lot of comedy. And at the time I began I was with my boyfriend, so there was romance,” she said. “Afghanistan is also like the rest of the world so I decided, you know what, I’m going to make a romcom.”
In the film, Sadat plays Naru, the only camerawoman at Kabul’s main TV station, who is separated from her cheating husband and struggling to keep custody of her three-year-old son.
At work, Naru is kept from covering hard news until she makes the most of a Valentine’s Day feature she is assigned, capturing women’s unvarnished views about the men in their lives. The station’s most prominent journalist, Qodrat, recognises her talent and begins taking her out in the field. Together they capture the last moments of relative freedom in the city.
As they crisscross Kabul, a spark catches between them and Naru starts to question whether it’s really true there are no good men in Afghanistan. “It is really, really difficult to be a good man in Afghan society,” Sadat said. “You get bullied, you get mocked by all the other men who share the same mentality: that women are animals and you have to take control and you have to be the boss, every woman in your family should be afraid of you.”
Sadat said depictions on screen almost exclusively reflected that “monster” image. “And I thought: I’m going to make a film which is going to be like a love letter to all these good men I know.”
Sadat aimed to depict an urban woman much like herself: strong-willed, financially self-sufficient and chafing at the indignities imposed on her by an ultraconservative tribal society.
She also wanted to push back against a tendency to “romanticise the era of democracy” by “putting 100% of blame on the Taliban” for women’s oppression while ignoring the underlying patriarchal structures that endured during the western occupation. “Being a strong woman is not enough if the system doesn’t support you.”
In one uproarious scene, an Afghan friend visiting from the US gives Naru a sex toy as a present to celebrate her newfound freedom as a single woman – certainly a first in the history of Afghan cinema. Sadat said she believes a passionate onscreen kiss shared by Naru and Qodrat is also unprecedented.
For an Afghan audience, Sadat jokes those kinds of brazen images will make it a “horror film, not a romcom”. But she is confident that despite official censorship and traditional values, Afghans will seek the film out, even if they have to watch it in bits and pieces on TikTok.
No Good Men is the third feature by Sadat, who was born in Tehran and moved with her family to a village in central Afghanistan when she was 12. Her debut Wolf and Sheep picked up an award at Cannes in 2016.
She said European film institutes were initially reluctant to back No Good Men as a comedy “while brave Afghan women are fighting in the streets of Kabul against the Taliban – like, ‘how dare you?’”.
“And I was like, what? I am one of those women and I want to make something and you’re standing against me. How dare you? I actually feel offended that you feel offended by my project. So it was really kind of comedy itself. A tragicomedy.”
She managed to cobble together funding from across Europe and filmed No Good Men in Germany, where she has a temporary visa, using an all-Afghan cast.
Berlin film festival director Tricia Tuttle handpicked No Good Men as the opener of the 76th edition, passing the mantle from some of the world’s top auteurs. Tuttle called Sadat “one of the most exciting voices in world cinema,” noting she “risked so much to get this film made”.
