A smile for life

Born in Tehran in 1991, Shahrbanoo Sadat spent her early childhood in Iran, where she faced severe racism and discrimination as an Afghan refugee and was eventually expelled from school because of her nationality.

After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, she moved to her parents’ village in central Afghanistan. Following six years out of school, she convinced her father and local authorities to allow her to attend a boys’ school, entering directly into the 12th grade.

At 18, she moved to Kabul and enrolled at Kabul University, where a registration error placed her in the Cinema Department. She quickly left her studies to work at Tolo TV, one of the most prestigious private television channels in Kabul at the time.

The same year, she directed her first documentary, A Smile for Life, during a workshop with Ateliers Varan. At 19, she became the youngest filmmaker selected for the Cinéfondation Residency at Cannes, where she developed her first feature, Wolf and Sheep, which won the Art et Cinéma CICAE Award in 2016.

Her short fiction film, Vice Versa One (2011), was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. In 2013, she founded Wolf Pictures and co-directed Not at Home with her later producer Katja Adomeit; the film was selected for the Rotterdam Film Festival. Her second long-feature film, The Orphanage (2019), premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight.

After the Taliban returned to power in 2021, she went into exile in Germany. In 2026, her third feature, No Good Men, opened the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale).

These films are part of her planned five-film pentalogy, inspired by the unpublished autobiography of her friend Anwar Hashimi and by her own life experiences.