Review of No Good Men – A smart and urgent Afghan romance | Berlin Film Festival 2026

TAfghan director Shahrbano Sadat is a warm, approachable presence as writer, director, and star of No Good Men — the story of the women of Afghanistan in 2021 as they are on the verge of surrendering to the Taliban as American forces withdraw. It’s an urgent tale, which incidentally ends with a rousing finale reminiscent of Casablanca — though the central shift in the heart of the male hero, which the title gamely refutes, is perhaps a little too smooth.

Sadat is Naru, a woman effectively separated from her terrifying husband, burdened with the sole responsibility of her son as well as being the sole breadwinner. She works as a camera operator at a Kabul TV station. She has freed Western-minded friends – one of whom cheerfully gave her a vibrator as a gift. Naru is hired to work on softcore shows centered around magazine programs that have problem pages where women are patronized by aphrodisiacs.

She longs to work on real newscasts and gets her big break when a male photographer is not available for the station’s big interview with the Taliban leader. Broadcaster Qudra (Anwar Hashemi) is extremely misogynistic about this new woman he has to work with, and when the Taliban leader inevitably walks out of the interview on the grounds that Naru doesn’t cover her head enough, he orders her out of the truck on the way back to the station, ordering her to make silly noises about Valentine’s Day.

It was meant as a senseless humiliation, but Naru does a great job; Women open up to her about how awful their men are in a way they never could with a man. The bosses are impressed and she is also a very important part in securing a big story about a rape case. Kudurat himself seems to have had a 180-degree change of heart, and this married man begins a new extramarital crush on Naru, with genuine respect for her professional abilities. It’s a romance that reaches its crisis as Naru’s precarious rights are threatened by the Taliban and her vengeful husband and Kabul falls into the hands of theocratic bullies: a political catastrophe that affects women far more than men.

It’s a smart, pointed film – and almost a bookend to Samira Makhmalbaf’s more serious, non-Western film At Five in the Afternoon (2003) about women’s rights under Taliban rule being upended by the arrival of US troops during Bush and Cheney’s “War on Terror” – an invasion that caused progressive ideas to be abandoned as the nation reverted to anti-women’s attitudes in the heat of war. It’s a contemporary romance and the kind of movie that tells you things about Afghanistan that our evening news doesn’t cover.