Love is found in unexpected places at the Berlin Film Festival

Afghan Rom-Com Breaking Cultural Barriers Opens Berlin Film Festival

In an unexpected departure from the traditional portrayals of Afghanistan, a groundbreaking romantic comedy featuring what’s believed to be the first on-screen kiss in Afghan cinema history opened the 76th Berlin Film Festival on Thursday.

“No Good Men,” set in a Kabul newsroom during the tumultuous period just before the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, follows the story of Naru, a camerawoman navigating professional challenges in a male-dominated industry while dealing with personal struggles. Recently separated from her unfaithful husband, Naru fights to maintain custody of her young son while building her career in Afghanistan’s deeply patriarchal society.

Director Shahrbanoo Sadat revealed that the controversial kissing scene cost her the original lead actress just three weeks before filming began, forcing Sadat to step into the role herself. “The joke was everyone who wanted to play Naru, they didn’t want to do the kissing. I wanted to do the kissing, I didn’t want to do the rest of the film,” Sadat explained.

The resistance extended beyond casting challenges. Afghanistan’s small film industry typically expects productions to serve as positive public relations for the country, but Sadat had different intentions. “I love Afghanistan, but I cannot close my eyes to patriarchy, sexism, all the big topics, and just say the good things about Afghanistan, so I’m disappointing my people,” she acknowledged.

Making an Afghan film with European funding brought additional pressures. Sadat received multiple complaint letters from funders who deemed it inappropriate to support a romantic comedy given Afghanistan’s political situation. “For me it was like, wait a minute, what? I feel offended that you feel offended about my project,” Sadat said. “I’m coming from a war country, and this is my way of expressing myself.”

The filmmaker emphasized her desire to humanize Afghan characters through universal storytelling. While centered on one woman’s experience, the film also pays tribute to the “good men” in Afghanistan who refuse to exploit the privileges afforded to them by the patriarchal society. “No matter what, they are standing next to the women in their life. I really wanted to tell them, I see you, I admire you, I respect you,” Sadat said emotionally. “Women’s situation is not going to change alone.”

The festival’s focus on unconventional narratives from conflict regions continues with French-Lebanese filmmaker Danielle Arbid’s “Only Rebels Win,” which opened the Panorama section of the competition. The film portrays a 70-year-old Palestinian widow who falls in love with an undocumented Sudanese man 40 years her junior in Beirut.

Arbid views her work as inherently feminist. “It’s the idea that women can also fall in love at 70. It’s not only old rich men who can fall in love with young women,” she explained. Though the film contains no explicit sexual content, Arbid acknowledges that in Lebanon, even the premise is considered provocative.

“Succession” actor Hiam Abbass, a Palestinian living in exile in France for 37 years, stars as Susanne, with Amine Benrachid, himself a Sudanese-Chadian refugee, playing her love interest Osmane. Abbass believes these narrative choices reflect a broader artistic statement.

“We’re a mixture of a lot of things, and contrary to what many people think, we are very rich, but not in the sense of money. We’re very rich because we are very rich in humanity,” Abbass said. She emphasized that stories from conflict regions often speak to universal human experiences despite their specific cultural contexts.

Arbid echoed this sentiment, recalling her own experiences growing up in war-torn Lebanon. “I was obsessed about falling in love with the neighbor. I wouldn’t care. And I wanted the West to see me as a human being,” she said. “I want to make the characters in my films human enough that you can love them and feel you can be like them.”

These films challenge Western expectations about stories from conflict zones, offering complex human narratives that transcend geopolitical headlines and cultural stereotypes through the universal language of love and humor.