Iranian filmmaker Massih Parsaei will bring his feature debut Lovers Sleep Alone to the 2026 San Sebastian International Film Festival, where the Germany-produced drama will have its world premiere in the New Directors section. The film follows an Iranian exile living in Berlin and arrives at the festival after an earlier appearance at San Sebastian’s WIP Europa showcase in 2025, giving the project a clear path from development to its international premiere.
Set around Iman, a young Iranian man who has built his life in Berlin after leaving Iran and breaking ties with his family, Lovers Sleep Alone explores the quiet effects of exile through everyday routines rather than large political events. Iman works two jobs, caring for an elderly man and washing trucks, while moving through the city in search of both connection and solitude. His isolated routine changes when his cousin Maneli, whom he barely knows, arrives from Tehran for a short visit.
The story places personal distance at the centre of the film. Iman’s relationship with André, a man he meets for sex in a park, offers one form of closeness, while his unexpected time with Maneli reconnects him with a part of his past. Their conversations and shared experiences gradually challenge the separation Iman has created around himself.
The film’s San Sebastian journey began before its 2026 selection. Lovers Sleep Alone was presented at WIP Europa in 2025, a platform for films still in development or post-production. Its return to the festival as a completed feature in New Directors gives the project a notable progression within the same international event.
Massih Parsaei, who was born in Tehran in 1992, makes his feature filmmaking debut with the film. He wrote the screenplay with Hanna Thomschke and also handled the editing. The cast includes Pooyesh Frozandeh, Ava Darvishi, Marcel Kohler and Wolfgang Wobéto, with Pooyesh Frozandeh playing Iman. The role marks his first feature-film acting appearance, placing him at the centre of a story built around displacement, loneliness and the search for human connection.
Lovers Sleep Alone is also closely connected to Germany’s film-school system. The project was produced by Berlin-based Film Five and developed as a co-production with Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf. The university identifies the film as Massih Parsaei’s master’s graduation film, adding an educational dimension to a project that has moved from academic production into an international festival programme.
There is also an important change in the film’s technical details between its WIP presentation and its completed festival version. The 2025 WIP Europa listing gave the project a 90-minute running time, while San Sebastian’s 2026 New Directors listing now records the finished film at 87 minutes. The festival identifies Germany as its country of production and lists Arabic, German, Hungarian, Persian and Polish among its original languages.
Jakob Reinhardt is the cinematographer, while Mona Matbou Riahi composed the music and Jonas Schüler handled sound. These credits underline the film’s collaborative German production while keeping Massih Parsaei’s perspective at the centre of a story that moves between Iranian memory and contemporary urban Berlin life.
The film’s movement from WIP Europa to New Directors gives its San Sebastian appearance added context. Rather than arriving without a festival history, Lovers Sleep Alone returns to the same event after its earlier work-in-progress presentation, now ready to meet audiences as Massih Parsaei’s completed debut feature.
For Massih Parsaei, the festival offers a significant first international platform for a story rooted in Iranian displacement but shaped by life in contemporary Berlin. With Pooyesh Frozandeh leading the cast and the film carrying its journey from WIP Europa into New Directors, Lovers Sleep Alone arrives in San Sebastian as a debut shaped by both personal exile and European filmmaking.
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