A Portrait of director Shahrbanoo Sadat

Chaos reigns in the streets of Kabul. Everyone is rushing to the airport to catch a flight to Europe before the Taliban seize power. A woman and a man say their farewells, and a kiss follows. It was this kiss that prompted Shahrbanoo Sadat to take on the leading role in her own film NO GOOD MEN. None of the Afghan actresses she knew wanted to play the scene.

Shahrbanoo Sadat opened this year’s Berlinale with her third feature film. The 35-year-old director from Afghanistan says that she actually prefers to stay behind the camera. But now she herself is the definitive face of the feature, which tells the story of a woman and mother. Separated from her unfaithful husband, she attempts to make her way as a cinematographer within her homeland’s patriarchal system. Sadat calls the film a rom com; she chose an unusual genre because she wanted to show that Afghan cinema is diverse and full of possibilities: “There are so many clichés about Afghanistan, but I wanted to tell an authentic story.” It wasn’t necessarily intended to become a feminist story, but that does seem quite natural to her “because sexism reigns in Afghan society”. She has experienced all manner of discrimination and racism in her life.

Such experiences began in her childhood. Shahrbanoo Sadat was born in Tehran to Afghan refugee parents and grew up an outsider, labelled an “Afi”, a derogatory term used in Iran for refugees from neighbouring Afghanistan. At the age of eleven, she returned with her parents to their Afghan village, which brought the first culture shock for the now-director. “There was no school in the village, no electricity, no running water. It was like the Middle Ages.” She had to walk for three hours to attend school. Later, she moved to Kabul, initially wanting to study physics but enrolling in an art programme almost by chance.

In Kabul, she came into contact with the Varan Studio for young filmmakers, which enabled her to study in Paris. It was there that she discovered and fell in love with cinema, learning the basics of filmmaking in workshops. She directed her first short film, VICE VERSA ONE (YEKE VARUNE), in 2011, and presented it at Cannes. In 2013, she released the film NOT AT HOME, and in the same year, she founded the production company Wolf Pictures. Her next film drama, WOLF AND SHEEP, was screened in the Director’s Fortnight section at Cannes Film Festival in 2016 and won the Art Cinema Award.

To support herself, meanwhile she was produc­ing a cooking show for television, a job she says she “hated”. There, she met Anwar Hashimi, who was working as a journalist at the same TV station. This marked the beginning of their long and fruitful collaboration; her screenplays are based on both his and her notes. This is true, for example, of THE ORPHANAGE, which followed in 2019. Now, Hashimi plays the male lead in her latest film, NO GOOD MEN, produced with funding from Germany, France, Denmark, and Norway. The producer is Katja Adomeit of Adomeit Film.

Although the film is set in Kabul, it was shot entirely in Germany, where Shahrbanoo Sadat took refuge in 2021 when the Taliban had seized power. Many scenes were filmed in Hamburg, where she now lives, as well as in Berlin, Brandenburg, Rostock, and Hanover. The dramatized scenes are skilfully interwoven with real footage from Kabul, so that the viewer never gets the impression that the film story is not taking place in Afghanistan. The director meticulously cast all Afghan actors, and the sets are thoughtfully designed to create a contemporary Kabul look. Maximum authenticity is paramount to her.

Shahrbanoo Sadat worked on the film for six years, a period that completely turned her life upside down. What is currently happening in the Middle East naturally weighs heavily on her mind, even though she feels “completely numb” – it’s as if she is unable to process any more. She says she has been an outsider, a refugee, all her life: “First in Iran, then in Afghanistan, and now here.” She is broken inside, but filmmaking and a love of film have “healed” her: behind the camera, she feels at home – perhaps for the first time in her life.

Marion Meyer