Massih Parsaei’s feature debut Lovers Sleep Alone is headed to the 2026 San Sebastian International Film Festival, where the Iranian filmmaker will compete in the New Directors selection with a Berlin-set drama about exile, isolation and desire.
The film premieres Sept. 25 at the Spanish festival, which runs Sept. 18-26. A new clip unveiled by The Hollywood Reporter offers an early look at the project, showing a car window framing the gloomy, busy streets of the German capital as a passerby reflects on whether fear can feel like an illness.
Lovers Sleep Alone stars Pooyesh Frozandeh as Iman, in what marks the actor’s first feature film role. The screenplay was written by Parsaei and Hanna Thomschke.
A Berlin portrait of absence
The film centers on Iman, a man who has built a life in Berlin around what is missing: “From his family, from Iran, from being known,” according to the synopsis. Iman moves through the city while seeking both connection and distance, working by day and night as a caregiver for an old man and at a truck wash.
The synopsis describes Iman filling his silence with invented stories and with “a man he meets for sex in a park.” As he makes his way through Berlin, fragments from the lives of other passersby move alongside him. The story shifts when his cousin Maneli arrives from Tehran, and “what Iman left behind quietly finds its way back to him.”
Parsaei has described the film as deeply connected to his own life and to the lingering effects of departure. “This film comes out of my own experience of leaving, and of everything that time doesn’t fix, even long after you’ve arrived,” he said. “Iman is a queer man in exile, on the margins in more than one way. He stands between the images of desire he grew up with and the ones that are only beginning to form, ones he is still learning to trust.”
The filmmaker added that he wanted to approach Iman’s interior world without turning the character into a case study or a redemption narrative. “I know that in-between from my own life, and I’ve rarely seen it on screen,” Parsaei said. “I didn’t want to explain him, or account for how his past shaped the person he is now. Not his suffering, not a story about being saved. I wanted to show his days, and the state underneath them. Iman is the passer-by we don’t pass by, the one we stay with.”
Cast and production details
Alongside Frozandeh, the cast includes Ava Darvishi, identified as an Iranian actor, theatre maker and playback theatre practitioner based in Ghent, Belgium. Marcel Kohler, a German stage and screen actor based in Berlin, also co-stars.
Lovers Sleep Alone is a Film Five GmbH production, made in co-production with the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg. The project received funding from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg as part of the Leuchtstoff initiative, and was supported by the Young Talent Foundation Berlin.
What happens next?
With its Sept. 25 premiere set during the closing stretch of the 2026 San Sebastian International Film Festival, Lovers Sleep Alone will enter the New Directors competition as Parsaei introduces his Berlin-set debut to festival audiences. The clip now circulating ahead of the premiere offers only a brief glimpse, but the confirmed synopsis and Parsaei’s comments point to a character study rooted in exile, queerness and the emotional residue of leaving home.