‘In Iran, They Cut 3-Hour Bollywood Films To 1 Hour, With No Songs’

‘Much later when I came to Afghanistan, I realised that there were songs in Bollywood films.’

Naru is convinced that there are no good men left in Kabul, when she begins to connect with Qodrat (Anwar Hashimi), a producer who is senior to her. In a Casablanca-like situation, sparks fly between Naru and Qodrat, while the Taliban forces approach the outskirts of Kabul.

No Good Men is set in Afghanistan, but was made almost entirely in Germany, where Sadat and her regular collaborator Hashimi have refugee status. It was the opening film at this year’s Berlinale. It was a rare move by a festival that usually highlights western narratives as its opening films.

No Good Men is also a reflection of a changing Afghanistan, or the change that was gradually happening, before the Taliban once again took over the country in 2021.

In the Kabul society that Sadat creates, sexism and patriarchy is deeply rooted, women wear hijabs, but in private situations they also gossip, talk about their desires and use of sex toys. There is even a kissing scene in the film.

Sadat’s first two films Wolf And Sheep (2016) and The Orphanage (2019), premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the Cannes film festival. The Orphanage narrated the story of a teenager in Kabul who makes a living selling Bollywood film tickets in black. He is a fan of Amitabh Bachchan and dreams of wooing the girl he likes by singing to her songs from the Big B’s films.

Aseem Chhabra spoke to Sadat after the film’s Berlinale premiere, where she spoke about her life in Iran (the country of her birth, where her parents once were refugees) and later in Afghanistan, and how she fell in love with cinema.

On growing up as a refugee, she says, “My parents were typical refugee parents. Physically and emotionally, they were not available for me. They were in survival mode, trying to provide for the family. There was no adult around me to explain that what was happening was racism. So I took it personally, thinking I was broken and something was wrong with me.”

‘Being a journalist in Afghanistan is really tough. You witness so many suicide bombings and terrorist attacks’

Shahrbanoo, I read that you found a television studio in Germany which looked like the station in Kabul where you had worked. But since the entire film was made in Germany, how did you recreate the street scenes?

We found the main location of the TV station in Hoppegarten, which is in the state of Brandenburg. It’s a German film archive, which was created during GDR(East Germany). It was inspired by Soviet architecture, and we also had Soviet architecture in Afghanistan. When I visited that location, it was exactly like the National Radio Television building in Kabul.

The majority of the street scenes that you are talking about are archival footage that had been shot by real journalists and cameramen, mostly my colleagues back in Kabul. I worked in TV from 2009 to 2014. I was a producer of a cooking show. Anwar Hashimi, who plays Qodrat, was working as a producer in the news section. So we knew all those colleagues.

To me, this film is also a love letter to all the good journalists in Afghanistan, who are risking their lives.

Being a journalist in Afghanistan is really tough. You witness so many suicide bombings and terrorist attacks. I have been a vegetarian since 2014. I could not eat meat anymore. I have watched so much footage of human flesh.

In 2021, I went back to Afghanistan for research, and followed several journalists for four or five weeks. I realised a lot of them were vegetarian for the same reason. They connect meat with human flesh.

I thought this archive footage should be shot by them because it’s their film too. I asked them to send me footage. It makes a lot of sense even if it doesn’t matter to a Western audience. For people living in Kabul, it’s really a street after this street, coming after that street, in the right order. But we used VFX to create mountains.

Still, there’s a smell of Kabul and Afghanistan in the film. What was your life like in Afghanistan, which eventually led you to make this film. You have said you were trying to make a real Afghan movie. What do you mean by that?

I have a long answer to that. My parents fled the Soviet Afghan war in 1979 to Iran. I was born in Iran as a refugee.

For me, Iran was home, but I was always told that I was a refugee and had to go back home to Afghanistan. In Iran, there is extreme racism against Afghans.

Iran is not a diverse society. Ninety-eight percent of immigrants and refugees are Afghans. But my parents were typical refugee parents. Physically and emotionally, they were not available for me. They were in survival mode, trying to provide for the family.

There was no adult around me to explain that what was happening was racism. So I took it personally, thinking I was broken and something was wrong with me.

As 9/11 happened, my parents decided to go back to Afghanistan. Not to Kabul, but to the village in the middle of nowhere, in mountains in Central Afghanistan. I thought at least in Afghanistan, I could go to school because in Iran, I couldn’t go for a couple of years.

Of course, I was wrong because my parents went to a village with no electricity. It was like you were sitting in a time machine and you went centuries back.

If you see my debut film Wolf And Sheep, you see what kind of location I am talking about. And I am a city girl, born in Tehran. I didn’t know anything about mountains. My parents didn’t know what was happening with me.

Now when I hear that Afghan or African girls cannot go to school, I know the feeling. So I finally spoke to my sister, and she spoke to my other sister, and my other sister spoke to my mom, and my mom spoke to my dad. That’s the way the power dynamics worked in our household.

Finally, my dad allowed me to go to the boys’ school, which was in another valley. I went to the 12th grade. I had missed 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th grades. After graduating from high school, I came to Kabul and joined the university, where they had a very small and uninspired film studies programme.Until all these years, I had never been to a cinema. It was never part of my life.

‘They would cut down the three-hour Bollywood films to like, one hour, and they took out all the songs’

But didn’t you watch Bollywood films? Because The Orphanage is full of references to Bollywood cinema.

I watched some Bollywood films in Iran. We were working class refugees and the only thing I could watch was on the Channels 1 and 2, both Iranian national TV.

The censorship was very strong and they chopped everything, they changed the plot, they dubbed the films. They would cut down the three-hour Bollywood films to like, one hour, and they took out all the songs.

Much later when I came to Afghanistan, I realised that there were songs in Bollywood films. I had never been inside a cinema theatre in Iran nor Afghanistan.

When I came to Kabul, we had four or five cinema theatres, but they didn’t have the cinema culture. Cinema theatre was a place where addicts would hang out. No woman ever went to those theatres.

So the very first time that I went to a theatre, it was when I got a residency in France. It’s called Atelier, run by La’Cinéfondation. One of the first films I watched was Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven.

I didn’t know who Terrence Malick was, but I just loved that film! It was the first time that I sat in this dark room and watched a film on a big screen.

This was not even in my wildest dream. I just wanted to go to school. My world was very small and limited. No form of art was allowed. Earlier, I had joined the cinema faculty in Kabul, but even then I thought I would get a job after that.

At the Atelier workshop, they taught me cinema. For three months, we traveled around the world, even to poor countries with no film culture, including Afghanistan. That is when I saw films by Agnes Varda.

I fell in love with cinema! One day, a student asked my teacher, how can we make such a masterpiece? My teacher said, you cannot, because that’s her story. You can make your own story.

I don’t know what my classmate took from it, but for me, that was an aha! moment. I understood that cinema is not about technique. Cinema is not about cameras or lenses, it is about stories. Which is when I thought of the mountains and the village, and that became Wolf And Sheep.

In the film, you feature lovely Valentine’s Day interviews with women. How did you come up with that idea?

I had a plan because I was developing this project back in 2020. I wanted to make a love story in present day Kabul. My real plan was to interview 2,000 women and get a Vox Pop kind of programme. Also in the Afghan media, whenever there was Vox Pop, it was always about men. Usually, TV stations only sent cameramen to do Vox Pol, but they couldn’t approach a woman with a camera. It was very sensitive.

But when I started to make this film, I realised there is an advantage in this disadvantage. Because when you live in a deeply patriarchal society, as a woman, you are always ignored. You have this constant feeling that you are invisible.

So it was a great opportunity because as a woman, I could make contacts with other women. Majority of Afghan men would not know how to behave with women. They just didn’t get that education from society.

‘The women weren’t comfortable with the sex toys scene’

This is the first time we see you on the screen as an actress. Can you talk about that experience?

I never thought that I was going to play in the film. Because of the tough experiences I had growing up in Iran and then in Afghanistan, I had all these insecurities and didn’t believe the audience would like to see me as an actor.

I had cast another person, but she left the project after being intensely involved for two years. She left the project three weeks before shooting. I considered a few other women who were good, but they were afraid of the kissing scene in the film. They weren’t comfortable with the sex toys scene.

That’s when I thought I have been censored all my life, I was not going to censor myself. A few women were willing to do that, but they were second or third generation Afghans. They couldn’t speak the language or their accent was not right.

So I had to step in. The miracle happened when I saw myself for the first time in the playback. We did the first shot, and then I ran behind the camera and saw myself in the playback. That’s when something amazing happened to me. I saw myself literally for the first time and realised this would work.

Are you worried about the reaction from the Taliban? Or are you long past the stage of worrying?

I don’t think the Taliban have the time, interest, care or even access to watch my film. At the end, to them, I am just a woman who fled the country and makes content to satisfy