When the US left Afghanistan in 2021, director Shahrbanoo Sadat waited 72 hours with his family at the airport in Kabul. The chaotic scenes as desperate Afghans tried to escape the Taliban were also the hardest to recreate in “No Good Men” – a romantic comedy that mixes love and rebellion on the eve of the Taliban’s return.
– The film is a love letter to all the good men I know. A tribute to women and men who defy violence and oppression and still find joy and community. That’s what 35-year-old Shahrbanoo Sadat, who plays the lead role in the film, says when I meet her in the Festival Palace on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.
The Afghan director With her all-black outfit, she wears large pearl earrings, a skirt with a matching blazer and a merch cap for the film with the text “No good men”. She describes herself as a “naive optimist,” has the energy of a small nuclear power plant, and isn’t afraid to use the “F-word.” Above all, she has an infectious joy for life.
But the path to the red carpet in Berlin was anything but smooth. Selling an autobiographical romantic comedy set in war-torn Afghanistan wasn’t the easiest of things. Several European film institutes questioned the project: How did she have the courage to make a funny film in which Afghan women fight against the Taliban?
– I was angry and considered it a pure insult. “I’m just one of those women and I want to create something new,” says Sadat.
After a lot Strul eventually managed to put together a patchwork of funding from across Europe, including Sweden. The film was shot in Germany with an all-Afghan ensemble and interspersed with authentic archive material from Kabul.
The plot revolves around Naru, the only photographer at Kabul’s largest television station. She is separated from her unfaithful husband and is fighting for custody of their three-year-old son. During a job assignment, she meets the station’s shy and married star reporter, Qodrat (Anwar Hashimi). He is initially skeptical about working with a woman, but becomes increasingly impressed by Naru’s professionalism – especially when she conducts a street survey before Valentine’s Day in which women give their unvarnished opinions about the men in their lives.
Together, the two colleagues venture into the field to capture Kabul’s last moments of relative freedom. In the film, Qodrat is a vegetarian – inspired by director Sadat, who herself stopped eating meat twelve years ago after seeing countless images of mutilated bodies while working for a television station in Kabul.
– I thought it was just me, but when I accompanied some journalists researching the film in 2021, they told me the same thing – they can’t see flesh, they associate it with dead people.
In the film, Qodrat takes the opportunity to confess to Naru: “It’s really, really hard to be a good man in Afghan society. You get ridiculed by other men who share the same mentality: that women are animals, that you have to take control and be the boss, that every woman in the family should be afraid of you.”
– I want the film to represent a counterweight to the one-sided “monster image” of Afghan men, says Sadat, who in the afterword also takes the opportunity to toast the patriarchy with a phallic image on a thorny cactus.
The budding and chaste The love between Naru and Qodrat ultimately ends in a tender but cathartic kiss – something Sadat considers unique in Afghan film history. Even more unusual is the risqué scene in which Naru is given a pink Barbie dildo by a friend returning home from the US – a gift to celebrate her newfound freedom as a single.
Sadat jokes that this will make domestic audiences perceive the film as a “horror film and not a romantic comedy.” The scene was apparently too much for many Afghan actresses. When the lead actor dropped out two weeks before filming began, it was difficult to find a replacement.
– Almost all actors rejected the film because of the kissing and sex toy scenes. But I refused to cut them out of the script – I didn’t want to censor myself any longer.
In the end it was like that Sadat himself took the lead role.
– On the first day of filming, I activated autopilot mode, just like in Kabul, where you live in constant readiness because life can end at any moment. I had no technique, I was just pure adrenaline. The miracle happened when I watched the footage on the monitor – it was the first time I really saw myself. As a woman in a patriarchal and ultra-conservative clan society, you often feel invisible, she says.
Shahrbanoo Sadat was born as a refugee in Tehran, where her parents fled the Afghan-Soviet war. It was only after September 11, 2001 that the family returned to a remote mountain village in their homeland. After facing racism in Iran, she was viewed with suspicion and as an outsider in the country she had never visited before.
“It was complicated,” she says with a wry smile in the festival’s biggest understatement.
– My parents were typical refugee parents – physically and emotionally absent, in survival mode. No adult explained to me that I was subjected to racism, so I took it personally.
Well, “at home” in Afghanistan She hoped to at least be able to go to school – something that had been impossible in Iran. But she was disappointed.
– As a city girl from Tehran, it was like a trip back in time. There was neither electricity nor a school in the village. Only after several years of persuasion was I allowed to set up a boys’ school in another valley – a three-hour climb away.
She eventually moved to Kabul and ended up at film school by chance.
– I actually wanted to study physics, but by chance I took the wrong entrance exam and ended up among the film students. I was there for a few semesters before I realized I was wasting my time and the teachers were terrible – I had barely learned how to turn on a camera. In the end they kicked me out because I called a teacher a racist. Thanks for that, otherwise I would probably have stopped, she says with a smile.
Unlike many She has no memories of magical moments in the cinema from her directing colleagues in Berlin.
– We couldn’t afford it and in my family all art was forbidden, even music at weddings. Plus, there was no real cinema culture in Afghanistan when we came back – just a few buildings showing bad films from Pakistan and where drug addicts hung out. No woman went there.
She went to the cinema for the first time in 2010 when she received a scholarship to France.
– I saw Terrence Malick’s “Heavenly Days.” I didn’t know who he was, but I loved the movie!
Another turning point came when she attended the French film school Atelier Varan, where she found her calling.
– Everything fell apart for me when my teacher said: “You can’t repeat Agnès Varda’s masterpiece – you can only tell your own story.” “It was an aha moment for me, and that’s how the idea for ‘Wolf and Sheep’ came about,” she says of the debut film, which won an award at Directors’ Week in Cannes 2016.
With “No Good Men” Sadat also wants to nuance the image of Afghanistan and counteract the Western world’s tendency to romanticize the democratic era before the return of the Taliban.
– I don’t deny that the Taliban are Afghanistan’s biggest problem today, but even in the “democratic era” they were no picnic, says Sadat, pointing, among other things, to the widespread corruption that has characterized the country.
– I know there are good men, but we need more – both in Afghanistan and in the world.
Facts.Shahrbanoo Sadat
● Afghan director and screenwriter. Born in Tehran in 1990 when the family lived as refugees in Iran. Migrated back to Afghanistan after September 11, 2001. Now lives in Hamburg on a temporary visa.
● come in She took part in a film training course in Kabul, but dropped out halfway due to an argument with the teachers.
The breakthrough came with the debut “Wolf and Sheep” (2016), which won the main prize in the side section “Critics Week” in Cannes. Also directed “Kabul Children’s Home” (2019).
● Currently with “No good men” opened this year’s film festival in Berlin, which takes place from February 12th to 22nd.
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