Massih Parsaei’s San Sebastian-Bound Debut ‘Lovers Sleep Alone’ Chronicles a Queer Man in Exile (Exclusive Clip)

The Hollywood Reporter can unveil an exclusive clip from Massih Parsaei’s Lovers Sleep Alone, set to premiere at the upcoming San Sebastian Film Festival.

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.

With a screenplay from Parsaei and Hanna Thomschke, the tender 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.”

“When his cousin Maneli visits from Tehran,” the synopsis continues, “what Iman left behind quietly finds its way back to 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.

The clip released to THR, which you can watch below, shows a car window looking out onto the gloomy, bustling streets of the German capital as Iman and Maneli ponder over whether fear can often feel like an illness.

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 International Film Festival runs Sept. 18-26.