Courtesy of No Hard Feelings.
Faraz Shariat opens his debut film No Hard Feelings (Future Drei), which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival last weekend, with a home video of himself as a child dancing in a Sailor Moon costume, because the film is about him. The 25-year-old director was inspired to make the film after getting caught shoplifting a Givenchy sweater and having to do community service at a refugee home at the height of Germany’s refugee crisis in 2015. The story unfolds as a privileged second-generation Persian-German club kid, Parvis (who is based on Faraz himself) meets an Iranian brother and sister who are seeking asylum in Germany.
“I went from the mindset of stealing luxury goods with a detagger that I ordered from China to going into a refugee home,” Shariat tells SLEEK. “Seeing what I saw and also how the refugee situation was being represented in the media, it struck me that there was very little representation that tries to let people be more than their history and the traumatic events that happened to them.”
When minorities, and especially refugees, are represented in media, it is often as either victims or villains, but for Shariat, who wrote the film alongside Paulina Lorenz, it was important to look beyond stereotypes to tell an approachable story about realistic characters. “Our figures don’t need to be perfect immigrants,” the director says. “They can make mistakes and be egoistic. Many of us in the second generation grow up with the feeling that we have to be 15-times better than the rest and can’t make mistakes in order to have the right to be here. It is important to show that a character can be egoistic, spoiled and problematic too. It really affects you when all you see on TV are pictures of refugees that are running from violence or become drug dealers.”
Courtesy of No Hard Feelings.
Shariat’s characters are neither. The film consciously does not focus on why the refugee siblings fled from Iran; instead it explores who they were there, what they want from life now and how their situation makes Parvis re-examine what his parents went through coming to Germany after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Even as a German citizen, born and raised, Shariat often finds that conversations are too focused on where he is really from. One of the ways the film keeps the stories rooted in the present is the heavy use of pop culture and a style of filming heavily influenced by Shariat’s experience making music videos, which are less about drama and more about atmosphere. “We always knew there had to be a lot of pop in the movie,” he says. “It has the power to unify a diverse group of people. We wanted to create an intimate look into a world, but show the universal feelings that exist therein.”
One of the recurring figures is anime superhero Sailor Moon, who appears both in the opening sequence and again as the main character’s disguise at a costume party later in the film. Growing up queer, Shariat found that he lacked role models, so he turned to Usagi “Bunny” Tsukino for inspiration. “Many of us look for role models in fantasy, science fiction or esoteric genres,” he says. “Sailor Moon is a goddess for me. She’s badass.”
Courtesy of No Hard Feelings.
Part of what makes the film so interesting is that it refuses to limit itself to one issue. While attitudes towards immigration are at the forefront of the story, so are class issues and commentary on gender and sexuality. While the media can often silo these topics, in real life the axes intersect. Still, striking the balance isn’t easy. Raquel Molt, who did the casting for the feature, took three years to find the lead actors, searching through refugee homes, queer refugee homes, acting schools and in street castings. “We ended up working with three actors who have professional training,” Shariat says. “It was complicated because we wanted good actors, but we also wanted people who understood what we were doing and that have similar political interests and queer experiences and who know about migration.”
Another point that the team was unwilling to compromise on is having more than half of the dialogue in Farsi. Notwithstanding the recent international success of Parasite outside of Korea, subtitles can still be a barrier for audiences. The team chose to honestly represent the flipping between languages that many bi-cultural children are familiar with, switching seamlessly from German to Farsi.“When we spoke about the film with film institutes we often got the feedback that too much of it is in Farsi and that there should be more German, but it was important to us to show that this is also Germany,” Shariat says. “There are a lot of languages that are spoken at home in Germany.”
Courtesy of No Hard Feelings.
Faraz Shariat is one of 10 film industry creatives featured on SLEEK’s 10×10. See more here.
No Hard Feelings will be screened at Zoo Palast on Saturday 29 February.