NO GOOD MEN

Love, Freedom and the Last Days of a World

Written by Sunny Gill | Published by IFFSA Toronto

There is something quietly radical about Shahrbanoo Sadat making a romantic comedy about Afghanistan.

For decades, Afghanistan has reached international cinema largely through the vocabulary of catastrophe—war, occupation, extremism, displacement. In No Good Men, Sadat refuses neither history nor its violence. Instead, she insists that history is also made up of desire, humour, work, vanity, disappointment, friendship and the complicated business of falling in love. That insistence may be the film’s most political gesture.

Set in Kabul in 2021, shortly before the Taliban’s return to power, the film centres on Naru, a camerawoman at the city’s main television station. She is professionally capable but routinely diminished by the men around her; personally, she is separated from an unfaithful husband and facing the possibility of losing custody of her child. Her conclusion—that there are no good men—is therefore less a witty premise than a worldview produced by experience.

Then there is Qodrat, an established journalist, and the possibility of another kind of relationship.

Sadat is too intelligent a filmmaker to turn that possibility into a simple corrective. No Good Men is not interested in discovering the exceptional man who disproves patriarchy. Instead, it asks the more difficult question of whether intimacy between men and women can ever be separated from the structures of power in which they live. Even affection must negotiate marriage, work, reputation, motherhood, masculinity and the unequal freedoms afforded to each person.

That is also why the newsroom matters. Naru is not simply a woman waiting for history to happen to her; she is a camera operator—someone whose profession is to look, frame and record. The distinction is important. Within the film, an Afghan woman occupies the position of the observer rather than merely the observed, participating in determining what becomes visible and whose stories enter the frame.

Sadat adds another dimension by playing Naru herself. The filmmaker becomes the image-maker within her own film: an Afghan woman behind the fictional camera, and the same woman behind the cinematic one. In a story set just before Afghan women would face a profound contraction of their public and professional freedoms, that convergence of character and authorship carries particular force.

The characters do not yet know how abruptly their world is about to change. The audience does—and that knowledge gives even the film’s most ordinary moments an extraordinary fragility.

A woman going to work, colleagues arguing, friends laughing, an attraction beginning—none appears historically monumental. Yet viewed from the other side of August 2021, everyday freedom itself becomes precious. The approaching political rupture does not need to dominate every frame because it already inhabits our understanding of it.

There is something particularly compelling in the film’s refusal to equate political seriousness with solemnity. No Good Men can be funny, romantic, contradictory and alive while remaining acutely conscious of the forces gathering outside the frame. In doing so, Sadat resists reducing Afghanistan—or Afghan women—to the circumstances of their oppression. Her characters retain something more fundamental: the right to complexity, contradiction and ordinary life.

At its heart is a question larger than its deliberately provocative title. What does it mean to remain open to love when experience has taught you distrust—and to imagine a future at precisely the moment when history is preparing to close one down?

Sadat finds no easy answer. What she preserves instead is something cinema is uniquely capable of holding: the texture of a life before the world changes.

That makes No Good Men a particularly resonant film with which to open a festival: a work that looks outward at history through the intimate dimensions of human experience. After opening the 76th Berlinale, No Good Men now opens IFFSA Toronto 2026 on October 8, with filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat in attendance.