In what is his second feature film following No Hard Feelings (2020), Faraz Shariat moves from the intimate, auto-fictional coming-of-age story of the Iranian diaspora into a more outward-facing and political terrain.
Seyo Kim is a young prosecutor determined to confront far-right violence in eastern Germany. But when she herself becomes a target – surviving a racist attack on her life – Seyo decides to investigate on her own, defying explicit orders from her superiors and putting her life and career at risk again.
Developed with writers Claudia Schaefer, Sun-Ju Choi and Jee-Un Kim, the project draws not from a single case, but from a constellation of real ones — the NSU murders (a series of ten racist murders by a German Neo-Nazi terrorist groupcthat took place between 2000 and 2007), Hanau, Halle and other long-running investigations into far-right violence. Shariat approached the material with a grounding of the script in research with lawyers and prosecutors while shaping a character who enters the system in order to test whether change from within is possible.
Directed by: Faraz Shariat
Screenplay by: Claudia Schaefer
DOP: Lotta Kilian
Edited by: Friederike Hohmuth
Produced by: Paulina Lorenz, Jorgo Narjes, Faraz Shariat
Music by: Gabríel Ólafs
Premiered at Berlinale 2026
In Panorama
Starring: Chen Emilie Yan, Julia Jentsch, Alev Irmak, Arnd Klawitter, Sebastian Urzendowsky
The scenes where daily, ordinary acts such as riding a bike or buying a bun from a bakery become moments laced with unease, set among the brutalist architecture of East Germany. After surviving a racist attack, state prosecutor Seyo Kim takes her own case to court — confronting not only the perpetrators but also a justice system that turns a blind eye to right-wing extremism. Determined to confront far-right violence, she investigates against orders from her superiors, reopening long-closed “isolated cases” and tracing connections that suggest something far more structural than incidental.
The sounds in Prosecution function less as accompaniment and more as pressure. There is no guiding score telling the audience how to feel; instead tension accumulates through the repetition of institutional noises — the churn of a photocopier, the echo of footsteps along corridors, the sudden punctuation of a knock at a door. Set against the cement-grey architecture, each sound lands harder than expected, turning administrative routine into something approaching suspense. The effect is procedural, but it plays like a thriller. The film’s unease comes from this acoustic minimalism.
Shariat has spoken about struggling to find a story urgent enough to pursue as the political climate in Europe shifted after the optimism of the 2015 Willkommenskultur. Reading the screenplay in one night, he felt compelled to “put [himself] at the service of this story.” The phrase that Germany’s prosecution service is “the most objective in the world” recurs throughout
Prosecution almost like a legal mantra. It appears in dialogue as a line spoken with administrative calm, repeated often enough to sound less like reassurance and more like doctrine. The film never directly disputes it; instead, it places the statement beside moments that feel harder to categorise, letting the audience register the dissonance for themselves.
The subtext that emerges is a paradox: belief in objectivity can itself create a blind spot. When an institution is understood — especially comparatively — as fundamentally fair, its failures are more easily interpreted as anomalies rather than patterns.
Shariat doesn’t argue this openly; he stages it. Files are closed, language remains neutral, procedures are followed. Yet the repetition of the claim gradually shifts meaning, suggesting that certainty, rather than protecting justice, can sometimes make its cracks harder to see.
Rather than operating purely as a message-driven drama, Prosecution works deliberately as a restrained thriller. The antagonism often remains invisible: buried in archives, softened by polite witnesses and bureaucratic language. As Shariat notes, the tension comes less from confrontation than from a sustained feeling of unease, allowing the audience to move gradually closer to Seyo rather than being pushed toward immediate empathy.
Casting in Prosecution was, in Shariat’s words, “complex and exciting, and it would have been impossible without our outstanding casting director, Andrea Rodríguez.” The process began with Seyo, searching for an unconventional hero — “someone whose sense of strength, bravery, and coolness came from a quieter, more mysterious place.” Chen Emilie Yan delivers exactly that, and, as the director notes, it is remarkable this is her first screen role. She is brilliant as a young woman determined to expose institutional inadequacies while taking huge risks in doing so, at times breaking the very laws designed to create equity, leaving the viewer conflicted about both her methods and her necessity.
Another important aspect of the casting was to portray the presence of white power within institutions through characters who feel both threatening and charming, reflecting the ambivalence in recognising ideology when it presents politely. For Julia Jentsch’s role, the filmmakers looked for an understated lawyer — practical, matter-of-fact and willing to fight the necessary battles. The real lawyers they met were calm and restrained yet unapologetic in their persistence, and Jentsch captures that balance beautifully.
