The two films could not 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 harrowing psychological drama. Yet both premiered at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival and share a common thread: each is shaped by a woman director drawing on personal encounters with injustice in authoritarian homelands.
No Good Men opened the festival on February 12. Sadat, whose earlier features Wolf and Sheep (2016) and The Orphanage (2019) found favor at Cannes, plays the lead Naru, a single mother and camerawoman at a Kabul TV station. As she proves her professional worth documenting women’s views about men, Naru juggles workplace life, harassment from an indifferent ex and a budding relationship with a colleague. Her relatively flourishing downtown existence unfolds just before the Taliban’s 2021 return to power, which abruptly ended two decades of limited post‑Taliban democratization.
Sadat’s film depicts a circle of relatively privileged middle‑class women — financially independent, working in the “small bubble” of freedom downtown Kabul — who openly share their relationship problems and jokes, including a scene featuring a dildo bought in the United States. Sadat says that beyond that bubble, in provinces or districts, women often lose autonomy and must be accompanied by men. She is critical of what she calls Afghanistan’s “so‑called era of democracy,” arguing that international funding and a booming “women’s rights” industry enriched many NGOs and individuals without substantially changing women’s everyday lives.
Frustrated by repetitive depictions of Afghanistan as only war drama and by what she saw as NGO exploitation of the language of women’s rights, Sadat chose to reclaim the narrative through personal storytelling and a romantic comedy format. She encountered backlash from some who thought such a genre inappropriate while Afghans suffered politically; she pushed back, saying deciding which stories Afghans may tell strips them of humanity. After her 2021 evacuation from Kabul she has been living in Hamburg and shot most of No Good Men in Germany, assembling an all‑Afghan cast.
Roya stands at the opposite tonal extreme. Mohammadi’s film immerses viewers in the sensory deprivation and psychological torture of Iran’s notorious Evin prison from an inmate’s viewpoint. Melisa Sözen plays Roya, a teacher imprisoned for her political beliefs and confined to a three‑meter cell where flickering light and fellow prisoners’ screams intrude constantly. Subjected to torture aimed at producing a televised confession, Roya refuses to comply; for many prisoners, Mohammadi says, silence becomes the last form of resistance. Even after release — when an electronic monitoring device marks her as watched — Roya remains mentally trapped.
Mohnammadi drew on her own experience: she has been imprisoned in Evin multiple times and began writing while behind bars. Making the film allowed her to revisit and unpack those traumas, she said, though she also admitted she censored parts of her story to make the film bearable for audiences. Parts of Roya were filmed clandestinely inside Iran; other scenes were shot in Georgia. Mohammadi, a women’s rights activist, sees filmmaking as a way to give voice to the silenced and says she hopes to return to Iran after finishing another project.
Both films gain added resonance in light of ongoing repression in their countries. Mohammadi’s depiction of prison torture echoes the climate of violent crackdown against protesters in Iran since late December 2025; while official tallies put the death toll at 3,000, some reports compiling witness testimony estimate many times that number. Under Taliban rule, filming in Afghanistan is also perilous, which shaped Sadat’s production choices.
Though stylistically opposite — one light and comic, the other claustrophobic and grim — No Good Men and Roya reflect two female directors using personal experience and distinct cinematic approaches to confront patriarchy, repression and the struggle to give voice to people living under autocratic regimes.
Edited by: Brenda Haas