‘Lovers Sleep Alone’ Chronicles a Queer Iranian Man in Exile
The Berlin-set feature, about the isolated life of Iranian man named Iman, will e world premiere at the Spanish film festival
Massih Parsaei’s Lovers Sleep Alone will premiere at the upcoming San Sebastian Film Fest.
The Iranian filmmaker is competing in the New Directors selection with the Berlin-set drama, focused on an isolated lead character played by Pooyesh Frozandeh in the actor’s first feature film role.
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With a screenplay from Parsaei and Hanna Thomschke, Lovers Sleep Alone premieres on Sept. 25 at the Spanish film festival and follows Iman, who has built his life in Berlin around absence. “From his family, from Iran, from being known,” continues a plot synopsis. “He drifts through the city, chasing closeness and solitude. Day in, night out, he works as a caregiver for an old man and at a truck wash. He fills the silence with invented stories and a man he meets for sex in a park. On his endless paths through the city, the fragments from the lives of other passersby drifts alongside him.”
The debut filmmaker said about his personal ties to the project: “This film comes out of my own experience of leaving, and of everything that time doesn’t fix, even long after you’ve arrived. 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.”
“I know that in-between from my own life, and I’ve rarely seen it on screen. 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,” Parsaei added.
Lovers Sleep Alone is a Film Five GmbH Production, in co-production with the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg. The project was funded by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg & Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg as part of the Leuchtstoff initiative, and supported by the Young Talent Foundation Berlin.
Co-starring with Frozandeh is Ava Darvishi, an Iranian actor, theatre maker and playback theatre practitioner based in Ghent, Belgium, as well as Marcel Kohler, a German stage and screen actor based in Berlin.
Check out the snippet from Lovers Sleep Alone below.
The 2026 San Sebastian Film Festival runs Sept. 18-26.
