Love Your Nails!

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. (Ariana Dongus)

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.

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. Production company Oasys Digital Production (München, Germany).

Films: 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).