Berlinale 2026 | Director Shahrbanoo Sadat on her rom-com No Good Men, set in Kabul

Explore director Shahrbanoo Sadat's rom-com "No Good Men," challenging Afghan narratives at Berlinale 2026 and celebrating women's stories.

I ask Shahrbanoo Sadat how Hindi film songs of yore found their way into her last movie, the childhood drama The Orphanage (2019). She admits to having watched 400 Bollywood films from the 1960s-90s for it. She counts the movies of Raj Kapoor and Nargis, and this one number (‘Jaane Kaise Kab Kahan’) that Amitabh Bachchan sings in the forest, among her favourites. The 35-year-old Afghan filmmaker and actor, who was born in Tehran, Iran, now lives in exile in Germany.

Sadat’s latest, No Good Men, the third in her pentalogy of films based on her co-actor Anwar Hashimi’s unpublished autobiography, is Afghanistan’s first ever rom-com. It opened the 76th Berlin International Film Festival on February 12. This is her first outing at the festival.

Shahrbanoo Sadat | Photo Credit: Getty Images

In 2019, before the return of the Taliban, she had started flirting with the idea of this film, inspired by her everyday life as a young woman in Kabul. It was a “departure” for the award-winning Wolf and Sheep (2016) director, who until then had steered clear of the subject, because for two decades of democracy, “women’s rights” had evolved into a key slogan used to attract international funding. But, that year, she realised that she could no longer run away from the reality that women’s stories were her stories. In 2021, after Kabul collapsed, Sadat was evacuated. Her desire to make a rom-com became more urgent, to counter the bleak war dramas that have come to define Afghanistan.

No Good Men is set in 2021 Afghanistan, right before the Taliban’s return. Sadat plays the protagonist Naru, the only camerawoman at Kabul’s main TV station, who’s struggling to keep custody of her three-year-old son after leaving her serial-cheater husband. Convinced that no good men exist in her country, Naru is caught off guard when Qodrat, Kabul TV’s most important journalist, gives her a career opportunity. As the two crisscross the city reporting on its last days of freedom, sparks fly, and Naru starts to doubt herself: could there actually be a man of integrity out there? Excerpts from a roundtable interview:

Most films about women’s problems are dark and grim. But you show varied emotions in No Good Men.