Love Your Nails!

Forum Special 2026

History revisited: faces, gestures, postures. In Love Your Nails!, gender roles are reversed – men become women, women become men – and all of a sudden, the archive seems strangely fluid. Long, artificial nails gleam as a stylistic device, a joke, a commentary. Narges Kalhor does not use AI to make history more “realistic”, but to recode it: what is left of a shot when its social code is reversed? Which meanings vanish, which ones hit you in the eye? Between glamour, stigma and work, the film offers a glimpse into gender and class, visibility and status. Here, AI becomes a means of alienation that can sharpen criticism – and at the same time a levelling machine that transforms differences into superficialities. It is precisely this ambivalence that makes the film so compelling.

by Narges Kalhor (Director, Screenplay), Aydin Alinejad (Screenplay) Germany 2026 German, English 9' Colour & Black/White World premiere

Crew

Director	Narges Kalhor
Screenplay	Narges Kalhor, Aydin Alinejad
Cinematography	Nina Wesemann
Editing	Narges Kalhor
Music	Marja Buchard
Sound Design	Philip Hutter
Production Design	Gerrit Schweiger
Casting	Franziska Adams
Animation	Gerrit Schweiger
Producer	Clay Coleman
Executive Producer	Clay Coleman

Produced by

Oasys Digital Production

München, Germany

Narges Kalhor

Narges Kalhor, born in Tehran, Iran, in 1984, is an Iranian-German film director and artist. She studied film directing and visual communication and applied for political asylum in 2009 while attending a festival in Germany. Her multi-award-winning short film Sensitive Content attracted international attention. Kalhor's feature film debut Shahid (2024) was screened at the Berlinale Forum, where it won the Caligari Prize and the Arthouse Cinema Award (CICAE); Shahid also received the Hessian Film and Cinema Award 2024 for Best Feature Film.

Filmography

2002 Without Discourse; short film 2004 Roshangari haie iek morgh; short film 2006 We must have Died!; short film 2008 Die Egge; short film 2011 München–Teheran; short film 2013 Shoot Me!; short film 2014 Kafan; short film 2015 Lavaschak; short film 2016 Gis; short film · Lovogary; short film 2017 Neda; short film 2019 In the Name of Scheherazade; documentary 2021 SuperEnki from Osterwald; short film 2023 Sensitive Content; short film 2024 Shahid; Berlinale Forum 2024 2026 Love your Nails!; short film

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2026