No Good Men opened Berlinale 2026, and this funny, courageous, and romantic film about a pair of star- crossed lovers living in 2021 Afghanistan, right before the Taliban’s return and the fall of Kabul, is hard to resist, and leaves a wonderful sense of the power of love to turn anyone’s life around.
If women are used to men not coming up to scratch in most places, navigating relationships in modern day Afghanistan would be a challenge most would not be up for. Just like in When Harry Met Sally when a premise is set up early on that women and men can’t be friends, Naru, the only camerawoman at Kabul’s main TV station, has firmly decided that in her home country there are No Good Men.
She has plenty of evidence to back up her hypothesis, and yet when she meets Qodrat, Kabul TV’s most important journalist, things start to shift.
Directed by: Shahrbanoo Sadat
Screenplay by: Shahrbanoo Sadat
Cinematography: Virginie Surdej
Edited by: Alexandra Strauss
Produced by: Katja Adomeit
Music by: Harpreet Bansal, Therese Aune, Kristian Eidnes
Premiered at Berlinale 2026
In Berlinale Special
Starring: Shahrbanoo Sadat, Anwar Hashimi, Liam Hussaini, Yasin Negah, Masihullah Tajzai, Torkan Omari, Fatima Hassani, Ahmad Azizi
Director and screenwriter Shahrbanoo Sadat also plays the protagnoist Naru, forced to do so when the lead actress got spooked three weeks before filming commenced. With a bunch of conditions that would have changed the story entirely, the team let the lead go, and thank goodness they did, because its hard to imagine someone else bringing the humour and lightness to the role that is simultaneously so complex and political and activist and brave.
Early on in the film’s development, the team reaslised that filming couldn’t take place in Kabul as it was too dangerous, but the plan was to cast the film in Afghanistan and shoot in another country. And then Kabul fell to the Taliban, and Sadat found herself living in Germany. The Afghan community there became the cast she was looking for and the main Kabul TV station was a building called Hoppegarten, which had belonged to the Stasi in the GDR in Brandenburg.
Kabul is rendered perfectly, and as Sadat said, the imperfections became perfect, and the layers of pivot in the filmmaking a metophor for the survival of Afghanis all over the world.
“For me, filmmaking is about adaptation; adapting to any situation and making it work,” she said. “No Good Men became another practice of adaptation. On a personal level, it was the same. I cannot separate my life from my work. Afghanistan was once deeply tied to my identity. But living in Germany, I naturally let go of nationality. In Iran, I was called ‘Afghani’. In Afghanistan, I was called ‘Iranian’. In Germany, a ‘refugee’ and a ‘foreigner’. I realized these were all labels imposed from the outside. Inside, I have always been the same person.’
“In a way, the fall of Kabul broke my heart, but it also pushed me to grow. Another lesson of filmmaking: turning disadvantage into advantage, and finding something meaningful even in the most catastrophic moments.”
Qodrat, played by Anwar Hashimi, is the great ally for Naru’s freedoms and the champion for her opportunities. He seems to have it all…a man in a man’s world, universally loved, clever, with a family at home that stay out of the story. To make him even more attractive, he’s a little bit grumpy at first, and Hashimi manages to bring to the screen all the hestitation and ambiguity and strength of a man in love who isn’t meant to be.
In real life Hashimi has written an 800- page as yet unpublished autobiographical manuscript which has inspired Sadat’s five-part film series, of which No Good Men is the third instalement.
Hashimi and Sadat met when the director was working at a TV station in Kabul, Hashimi as a business news producer and Sadat as a producer of a cooking show, which she has said she didn’t exactly love doing. They became best friends, and as in the film, he pushed Sadat along.
“He made me question my belief,” she said. “I realized there are good men, and that other realities than the one I lived exist.”
Since the fall of Kabul in 2021 Sadat has been based in Hamburg. She has been selected three times for the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival—with her short film Vice Versa One in 2011, her debut feature Wolf and Sheep in 2016 (Camera d’Or nominee and CECAE Award winner), and her second feature The Orphanage in 2019.
At just 19 years old, Shahrbanoo became the youngest filmmaker ever selected for the prestigious Cannes Cinéfondation Residency.
When asked about whether she thought the Taliban would see the film, Sadat said, ” I don’t think the Taliban have the time, interest, care or even access to watch my film. At the end, to them, I am just a woman who fled the country and makes content to satisfy foreigners. For Afghans inside or in exile, I am definitely not expecting a positive reception. This is basically how things happen in a conservative and closed society: whenever someone does something that is provocative in any sense, it doesn’t land well.”
The ancient customs and thinking in Afghani society are as present today as ever, and backed by a government that wants to keep the country locked in the past, are being constantly renewed and refreshed to become contemporary.
On her thoughts for how things can change, Sadat said, “I think it is time for us, the Afghan people, to listen to other voices beyond the expectations of society. I also want to appreciate all the good men in Afghanistan, the men who don’t take advantage of all the privileges that a patriarchal Afghan society offers them. The men who, no matter what and under what circumstances, keep supporting the women in their lives and standing by them. The reality is that it is extremely difficult to be a good man in such a society. They get bullied, mocked, and their manhood is questioned. I just want to say to those men: I see you, I admire you and I respect you.”
