The films couldn’t be more different. “No Good Men,” by Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat is a feel-good romantic comedy. “Roya,” by Iranian director Mahnaz Mohammadi, is a distressing psychological drama.
Despite their contrasting styles, the works have one thing in common: They feature the distinctive directorial approaches of two female filmmakers who drew on their personal experiences of injustice in their autocratic home countries.
“No Good Men” and “Roya” both celebrated their world premiere at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.
A romantic comedy set amid Afghanistan’s political emergency
Shahrbanoo Sadat’s “No Good Men” opened the festival on February 12. The director’s previous feature films, “Wolf and Sheep” (2016) and “The Orphanage” (2019), were previously well-received at the Cannes Film Festival.
In “No Good Men,” described as Afghanistan’s first romantic comedy, Sadat plays the lead role of Naru, a camerawoman who proves her professional merit at a Kabul TV station, as she manages to document how other women feel about men in the country. A single mother, Naru continues to face harassment from her lazy ex, all while developing a new bond with one of her male colleagues.
In many ways, this is a flourishing period in Naru’s life, but it happens to take place just before the Taliban’s second takeover of the country, which interrupts the two-decade era of post-Taliban democratization, from 2001-2021.
In the film, Naru and her female friends are liberated and openly discuss their relationship problems. In one scene, they joke around at the office with a dildo brought back from the United States as a present for Naru.
In a Berlinale press interview, Sadat said the characters represented the country’s most privileged middle-class women: They have a job that allows them to be financially independent and have their own agency in the “small bubble” of freedom that is downtown Kabul.
But “the moment a woman leaves this bubble and goes to the districts or provinces, she loses part, or even all, of her independence. In many places, having a man with her is not a choice but a necessity,” Sadat said, referring to the extremely patriarchal system that remained in place during those two decades of relative freedom.
The filmmaker is also very critical of Afghanistan’s “so-called era of democracy,” during which “‘women’s rights’ became a popular industry in Afghanistan.”
While international funding flowed to boost empowerment, she said, there was corruption everywhere and the money rarely reached the women themselves. “Very little changed in women’s daily lives,” Sadat said. “Many NGOs and individuals became wealthy, while the women they claimed to support did not.”
As Sadat increasingly felt that the language of NGOs exploited the concept of “women’s rights” to their own advantage, she realized that she could reclaim the issue by commenting on Afghanistan’s sexism and patriarchal mindsets through her personal storytelling.
“At the same time, I was also frustrated that, in the stories and narratives that depicted Afghanistan, the country was almost always portrayed through the lens of war drama,” Sadat said, which led her to work on a romantic comedy.
Sadat faced backlash for the project, with some people feeling that the genre was inappropriate, knowing that people in Afghanistan were suffering because of the political situation. But she in turn was offended that others could determine the stories she should be telling; this was another way “of dehumanizing Afghans by not allowing them to make a film about human beings who live in Afghanistan – human beings whose daily lives also contain humor and lightness.”
‘Roya’: Living in a nightmare in Iran
There is no place left for humor and lightness in Iranian director Mahnaz Mohammadi’s “Roya”: The film depicts the horrible conditions in Iran’s Evin prison from an inmate’s subjective perspective, and equally portrays the psychological impact of torture.
Roya (played by Melisa Sözen) is a teacher whose political beliefs land her in the notorious prison. Confined to a three-meter cell where a flickering light and the other inmates’ agonizing screams perpetually occupy her sensory space, she is regularly tortured in order to obtain a forced televised confession.
Roya remains silent. For many prisoners, “this silence is the last way you can resist,” Mohammadi told DW.
The film also shows how Roya remains trapped in her silence, her mind still imprisoned, even when she is released — and required to wear an electronic monitoring device.
Having also been imprisoned in Evin multiple times, Mohammadi started writing in jail. “I spent years living with these experiences,” she said. “The film allowed me to revisit them, layer by layer, and better understand how the repression affected me and changed me.”
The film has a visceral real-life-horror-movie feel. Mohammadi said what she went though was even worse. “If I wanted to make my personal story, it couldn’t be showable,” she told the news agency Reuters. “I censored a lot (for the film) to be a little bit bearable to watch.”
The film portrays a situation that has been ongoing for years, but it gains relevance amid the Iranian authorities’ violent clampdown on protesters since the end of December 2025. Estimates of the number of people killed by the Islamic Republic’s authorities vary substantially, with information hampered by an internet shutdown. The Iranian government has acknowledged 3,000 dead, while reports compiling testimonies from around the country estimate the death toll to have exceeded 30,000.
Filming clandestinely to give a voice to the oppressed
Part of Mohammadi’s film was shot underground in Iran, while the rest was filmed in Georgia. The filmmaker and women rights’ activist says she hopes to return to her home country after completing another project. Working on these films is her way of giving voice to the “the silenced,” she says.
Under the Taliban, filming in Afghanistan is also extremely difficult and dangerous. Shahrbanoo Sadat, who has been living in Hamburg following her evacuation from Kabul in 2021, shot most of the film in Germany, using an all-Afghan cast.
“This is my way of expressing myself, to go through the oceans of unprocessed feelings and traumas — not only personal, but also historical and social,” Sadat said.
Edited by: Brenda Haas