QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM BERLIN
Kabul, 2021. Twenty-five-year-old Naru (Shahrbanoo Sadat) works as a camera operator on a television show where a male “expert” advises young women whose husbands cheat on and beat them for simply wearing “too much” makeup. Naru herself has recently moved back in with her parents with her three-year-old son after enduring her husband’s constant infidelity. Yet she cannot officially divorce him: under Afghan law, her husband could take their child away. She is convinced that in patriarchal, Islamist Afghanistan there are no good men capable of loving and respecting a woman. Frustrated, she asks the producer to transfer her from the absurd show that irritates her to more serious work. That is how she meets the well-known reporter Qodrat (Anwar Hashimi), who invites her to assist him on an important interview. Although the interview ends in failure, the 50-year-old journalist and the young woman gradually grow closer, despite the fact that Qodrat is married and has four children.
This brief film synopsis of the film – written by Afghan director Sadat and her longtime creative partner Hashimi, who are also in the leading roles – sounds like a melodrama or even a romantic comedy. Indeed, the opening credits – cactus flowers blooming against a black background – promise something beautiful yet thorny, much like Naru herself. But as it moves toward its conclusion, this Berlinale opening film earns the audience’s genuine affection through the depth and emotional precision of what unfolds on screen.
Sadat was born in Iran but is considered an Afghan filmmaker. She debuted at Cannes in 2016 with Wolf and Sheep and returned to the Croisette in 2019 with The Orphanage (2019), though major awards have so far eluded her. Just a week ago, her short film Super Afghan Gym premiered in Rotterdam as part of Cate Blanchett’s The Displacement Film Fund. The first two-thirds of No Good Men blend feminist sitcom energy (reminiscent of Lena Dunham) with a platonic, almost puritan love story. Yet the finale will break your heart – and not only because thousands of Taliban fighters storm Kabul in armoured jeeps. Sadat knows exactly what she is portraying: when the extremist Islamist group regained power, in August 2021 she was forced to flee the country.
With simple irony and clarity, she speaks about the condition of women in Afghanistan, where last week laws codified a husband’s right to beat his wife. At the same time, she does more than draw attention to the millions of disenfranchised women back home. Through skepticism and sharp humour, she expresses a fragile, almost fairy-tale hope that “good husbands” might still exist – even within deeply corrupted patriarchal systems. The film feels profoundly personal. It is unapologetically mainstream, designed to move audiences to tears, yet that emotional directness is its strength rather than its weakness. The meticulously staged crowd scenes – at the airport, on Kabul’s traffic-choked streets – convey the political tension of a country on the brink. And the comic wedding of the head of the opposition TV channel Kabul News (where Qodrat works), where guests dance to a cover of Modern Talking’s Brother Louie, carries an unexpected twist – at least for those unfamiliar with Afghanistan’s social realities.
In the end, No Good Men is less about romance than about dignity. It captures that fleeting moment before collapse, when ordinary gestures – sharing tea, holding a camera steady, daring to believe in tenderness – become acts of quiet resistance. Sadat frames love not as salvation but as risk: a stubborn insistence on emotional truth in a world determined to erase it. And in doing so, she creates a film that lingers like those cactus blossoms in the dark – brief, defiant, and impossibly alive.
And in this fragile balance between irony and despair, Sadat finds her own cinematic language: direct, humane, and free of pathos. Even when the story takes a tragic turn, she does not abandon her tenderness toward her characters. Her Kabul is not only a place of fear and destruction, but also a space of everyday life, awkward confessions, professional ambitions, and quiet, almost impossible feelings. That is precisely why the film resonates so deeply: behind the political catastrophe there is always a specific human being, with a voice, doubts, and the right to love.
No Good Men just opened the 76th edition of the Berlinale
