It is not easy to pick an opening film for any festival, and the Berlinale’s reputation imposes its own requirements and expectations. Billed as a political rom-com, No Good Men by one of Afghanistan’s best-known filmmakers, Iranian-born, Hamburg-based Shahrbanoo Sadat, ticks all the right boxes. It’s the third instalment in her planned autobiographical pentalogy, following two Cannes Directors’ Fortnight entries, Wolf and Sheep [+lee también:
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entrevista: Shahrbanoo Sadat
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Sadat, who also wrote the script, plays Naru, the only camerawoman at Kabul News, a TV station respected for its political edge in liberal circles, in 2021, right before the Taliban takeover. When she is assigned to follow star journalist Qodrat (Anwar Hashimi) for an interview with a high-ranking Taliban leader, he is confused, having expected a “proper camera operator”. But he grudgingly accepts her, having no other choice.

After the Taliban uses the fact that her shawl has slipped off her head as an excuse to cancel the interview, Qodrat drops her off on the street to do some vox pops on the occasion of the upcoming Valentine’s Day. Although it was meant as a punishment, Naru gets quotes from women on Kabul’s streets, which no cameraman at the station has ever managed to do, earning her respect from colleagues and Qodrat himself. The two keep working together and get increasingly close, but in Afghan society, with both of them married and with children, a romantic relationship is something they’d have to be very cautious about. Moreover, Naru is separated from her husband and is wary of getting a divorce, as it would lead to her losing custody of their young son, Liam.

Sadat balances the personal story with the social and political background by peppering the film with cultural signifiers in scenes that mostly feel organic to the narrative. A standout example is when a colleague who comes back from the USA gifts her a vibrator – she is clearly a woman of the world in the Afghan context, different in attitude, attire and way of speaking from everybody else at the TV station.

Recreated in Germany, the pre-Taliban Kabul is a vibrant city that is still strongly patriarchal. One of the film’s key points is the discrepancy between the common, idealised image of a liberated society and the reality on the ground. Sadat mostly succeeds in depicting this contradiction via several engaging scenes that tackle both directly political and more subtly cultural issues.

While it’s not a laugh-out-loud comedy, the overall vibe of No Good Men is lively and emotional, with this latter quality successfully varying in intensity thanks to DoP Virginie Surdej’s carefully devised and rich framing, and the bold musical score by Harpreet Bansal, Therese Aune and Kristian Eidnes. But it’s the chemistry in the animated Sadat and the charismatic Hashimi’s interplay that allows the viewer to trust the story, even when the proceedings occasionally dip down in their dynamics. Both actors imbue their characters with an underlying seriousness and awareness to keep the story plausible, and its final stretch firmly grounds it in reality, bringing some much-needed gravity to counterbalance the fairly clumsy melodramatic development that is probably necessary to fully justify the film as a rom-com.

No Good Men is a co-production involving Adomeit Film (Germany/Denmark), La Fabrica Nocturna Cinéma (France), Motlys (Norway), Wolf Pictures (Afghanistan) and Amerikafilm (Germany). Lucky Number has the international rights.