A Portrait of director Faraz Shariat

If it hadn’t been for his father, Faraz Shariat might never have become a director. In the 1990s, the head of the family captured their life on VHS tapes, leaving a lasting impression on his son: “There was such power in seeing yourself in those images. I still carry that impulse with me today.”

It was this same impulse that led the now 32-year-old to present his film PROSECUTION at the 2026 Berlinale, where the legal thriller won the Panorama Audience Award. And it had also been the catalyst for his feature film debut – the autobiographically inspired NO HARD FEELINGS, a queer coming-of-age story that won the prestigious First Steps Award and the Teddy Award and screened in the Berlinale’s Panorama section in 2020. Shariat achieved all this despite never having been to film school and only having directed a few music videos before his first feature film. It was this focus on his own experiences that brought him “very close to the story” and gave him “an incredible amount of help” at the time. The integration of his own biography went so far that he even cast his parents as the protagonist’s parents.

Commercially, he has also pursued a unique path: While studying Performing Arts at the University of Hildesheim, he and his fellow students Paulina Lorenz – who was producer and co-writer of NO HARD FEELINGS – and Raquel Dukpa founded the production company “Jünglinge” as a collective.

But he certainly did not stay confined to his personal background; after the success of his debut, he ventured into other genres and milieus. While the British horror-comedy THE BABY (HBO) deals with the constraints of motherhood, for example, the series BLACK FRUITS (ARD) explored the realities of life for Black and queer people in Hamburg. PROSECUTION, different in its turn, tells the story of a young German-Korean public prosecutor who is attacked by a right-wing extremist and struggles for justice within the very system to which she belongs. “The world of justice is far-re­moved from what I would instinctively devise myself. In that sense, it was very positive for me that I didn’t write this script myself, as it gave me insights into a completely new context.”

Faraz Shariat shed his outsider status in the German film industry long ago. “We’re no longer in the position of the underground rebel.” This is evident from the fact that PROSECUTION received funding from various institutions. While the collective structure still plays a part in the creative work of “Jünglinge”, like in their collaborative screenwriting for the true crime series ZEIT VERRBECHEN (Paramount+), Faraz Shariat and Paulina Lorenz now operate a more traditional production company: “We produce our own material as well as selected projects by other filmmakers – always aiming to tell stories as specifically as possible and implementing them in a healthy, sustainable manner.”

Although Faraz Shariat is now an established German filmmaker, his ideas and plans extend beyond the national borders: “German cinema is where I grew up and now live, but the settings that come to mind are often more international. And we want to be even bolder with our projects.”

This global perspective is no coincidence. Faraz Shariat is the son of Iranian immigrants – just like the protagonist in NO HARD FEELINGS. This has shaped him profoundly “as an artist and storyteller”: “Iran has always been a place of longing for me; one I know primarily from my parents’ stories and my own dreams.”

Specifically, this means that he is working with the American writer Ottessa Moshfegh, who is half Iranian in descent, on an adaptation of her short story “The Beach Boy”, with which he plans to make his English-language debut. He also wants to film a “lesbian demon horror” in Farsi, set in 1990s Tehran.

This diversity, transcending narrative and aesthetic genres, enables him to follow his creative curiosity. At the same time, it reflects his own queerness, which is a theme or subtext of his stories: “I don’t link it to specific identities. It’s about questioning the status quo and trying to break down the dominant systems. That’s my idea of queer cinema.”

Rüdiger Sturm