Two very different films opened conversations at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, yet both are united by female directors drawing on personal encounters with injustice in authoritarian homelands.
No Good Men, by Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat, premiered on February 12 and takes the form of a feel‑good romantic comedy. Sadat, whose earlier features Wolf and Sheep and The Orphanage screened at Cannes, also stars as Naru, a single mother and camerawoman at a Kabul TV station. As Naru proves her professional worth collecting women’s opinions about men, she balances work, harassment from an indifferent ex and a budding romance with a colleague. The film follows a relatively privileged circle of downtown, middle‑class women who enjoy a small bubble of freedoms before the Taliban’s 2021 return to power cut short two decades of limited post‑Taliban democratization.
Sadat portrays a world where women are financially independent, openly exchange jokes about relationships and even display Western sex toys, a contrast she draws to life outside the urban bubble where women often lose autonomy and must be accompanied by male relatives. 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 benefited NGOs and some individuals without transforming most women’s everyday lives. Frustrated by repetitive portrayals of Afghanistan as only war drama and by what she sees as exploitation of women’s rights rhetoric, Sadat chose personal storytelling and rom‑com form to reclaim Afghan narratives. After evacuating Kabul in 2021 she has been living in Hamburg and shot most of No Good Men in Germany with an all‑Afghan cast. The choice of genre provoked some backlash, which Sadat rejects on the grounds that policing which stories Afghans can tell strips them of humanity.
Roya, by Iranian director Mahnaz Mohammadi, is at the opposite tonal extreme. It immerses viewers in the sensory deprivation and psychological torture of Evin prison from an inmate’s viewpoint. Melisa Sözen plays Roya, a teacher jailed for political beliefs, confined to a three‑meter cell where flickering light and fellow prisoners’ screams constantly intrude. Subjected to torture designed to produce televised confessions, Roya refuses to comply. Mohammadi says that, for many prisoners, silence becomes the last form of resistance. Even after release, when an electronic monitoring device marks her as watched, Roya remains mentally trapped.
Mohammadi drew on her own experience of repeated imprisonment in Evin and began writing while behind bars. Making the film allowed her to revisit and unpack those traumas, though she says she also censored parts to make the story bearable for audiences. Portions of Roya were filmed clandestinely inside Iran; other scenes were shot in Georgia. A longtime women’s rights activist, Mohammadi sees filmmaking as a way to give voice to the silenced and hopes to return to Iran after finishing another project.
Both films gain added resonance amid ongoing repression in their countries. Mohammadi’s depiction of prison torture echoes the violent crackdown against protesters in Iran that began in late December 2025; official tallies put the death toll at about 3,000, while some compilations of witness testimony estimate far higher numbers. Under Taliban rule, filmmaking in Afghanistan is also perilous, a reality that influenced Sadat’s production choices.
Stylistically opposed—one light and comic, the other claustrophobic and grim—No Good Men and Roya nonetheless reflect two women directors using distinct cinematic approaches and personal experience to confront patriarchy, repression and the struggle to give voice to people living under autocratic regimes.