Love Your Nails! | Shahid

This short film portrays a fantasy world in which traditional gender roles are reversed and long artificial nails serve as a recurring motif—as well as a weapon of choice for women. These nails can seemingly be used for anything: hunting, fighting, or even giving birth. Using AI to further invert and critique the unspoken codes underpinning gender and social norms, the film poses a provocative question: what if women used their power the way men have been doing throughout history—and continue to today?

Shahid
Dir.: Narges Kalhor, 2024, Germany, 84', German, Farsi, English with English subtitles

Shahid is both a political drama and a dark comedy. Narges Kalhor’s autofictional film explores historical heroes, contemporary crimes, and how they are dealt with in the present day. At its heart lies the desire to change a name: the director, played by an actor wishes to remove the word ‘Shahid’ (meaning martyr) from her own name, which was bestowed upon her great-grandfather in Iran as a title of honour a hundred years earlier. This mission not only goes against her great-grandfather’s wishes but leads to bureaucratic complications at the local administrative office in Bavaria as well as musical-esque scenes, making Shahid a deeply personal film that challenges radical ideologies while not taking itself entirely seriously.

Followed by a Q&A with Narges Kalhor
With Narges Kalhor, Can Sungu

Common Exceptions:

The film series Common Exceptions brings together current cinematic perspectives from German-speaking countries that depict migration as an integral aspect of social reality. For a long time, migrant experiences in German cinema were only told from an outside perspective—marked by clichés, didactic views, and oversimplified attributions. It was not until the 1990s that film-makers whose parents had migrated to Germany started to share their own stories, opening up new perspectives. However, this development was fragile and slow. It took a long time for a new generation of film-makers to give new impetus to pluralistic narratives in German cinema.

Common Exceptions presents works by this young generation that take precisely this approach. Their films refuse to justify their own existence or feel compelled to explain themselves. Migration appears here as a matter of course, rather than a dramatic state of emergency. With composure and humour, complex and precise at the same time, they formulate their own positions beyond external attributions. Whether autofictional, documentary, or essayistic, the films break with established patterns, combine intimacy with political acuity, and develop independent cinematic forms. They are plural, queer, intersectional, and deliberately unpredictable, as well as uncompromising, provocative, and empowering. Their particular strength lies in the productive contradiction of not having to be either ordinary or extraordinary. In this sense, they point to a promising future for German cinema.

Common Exceptions combines film screenings with discussions and other discursive formats. In collaboration with Berlin-based film initiatives and networks committed to long-term engagement, the series creates a space for exchange, networking, and sustainable collaboration.