Love is found in unexpected places at the Berlin Film Festival

A surprising and touching Afghan political rom-com that is said to feature the first ever on-screen kiss in an Afghan movie opens the 76th Berlin Film Festival Thursday.

Set in a Kabul newsroom in 2021, with the Taliban on the cusp of returning to power, “No Good Men” tells the workplace love story of camerawoman Naru, separated from her cheating husband and struggling to keep custody of her young son while trying to build a career in a male dominated industry and patriarchal society.

Director Shahrbanoo Sadat said the kissing scene cost her lead actor three weeks before shooting began, and forced her 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 said.

And it wasn’t just the casting that was met with resistance. The Afghan film industry is small, she said, so the expectation is that the movie will be “good PR” for the country.

Sadat had her own ideas, though.

“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 said.

Making an Afghan film in Europe, with European funding, she also felt added pressure to be a political and feminist filmmaker or make a war movie.

Sadat received multiple letters of complaint from funders who said it was inappropriate for them to support a rom-com given the political situation in Afghanistan.

“For me it was like, wait a minute, what? I feel offended that you feel offended about my project,” she said. “I’m coming from a war country, and this is my way of expressing myself, to go through the oceans of unprocessed feelings, not only personal but also historical and also social, and trying to make a lighter film.”

“I wanted to humanize Afghan characters and tell a story that is universal but also in Afghanistan,” she added.

While she said she made the movie about one woman, she also made it for all the “good men” in Afghanistan who are “not taking advantage of the privilege that the patriarchal society is offering them for free.”

“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,” she said. “Now I’m going to cry… because women’s situation is not going to change alone.”

A Palestinian widow finds romance in Beirut

Elsewhere in the festival, French-Lebanese filmmaker Danielle Arbid also leans into romance and humor instead of war and unrest to tell the tale of a Palestinian widow who finds love in Beirut with an undocumented Sudanese man 40 years her junior.

“Only Rebels Win” opens the Panorama section of the competition. Arbid sees it as a feminist film.

“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. ... This is my way of thinking. I hope we are not out of the market,” she joked.

While she admits people in Lebanon consider her provocative for the sexual references in her films, this one has no sex — though the “idea is already a problem.”

“Succession” actor Hiam Abbass stars as Susanne and actor Amine Benrachid, who is himself a Sudanese-Chadian refugee, plays her love interest Osmane.

Abbass, a Palestinian living in exile in France for the past 37 years, says it’s no coincidence that these types of stories are setting the tone for this year’s festival.

“We’re a mixture of a lot of things, and to the contrary of what a lot of people think, we are very rich, but not in the sense of money. We’re very rich because we are very rich in humanity,” said Abbass.

“Today if we talk about things that happen in our own country, our language is very universal and basically what we say of the world corresponds to what a lot of people live today, and what a lot of people suffer from,” she added.

Arbid said that war did not define her life when she lived in Lebanon as a teen.

“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.”