Afghan filmmaker Siddiq Barmak has completed principal photography on The Postman, a family drama set in Kabul in 1992. Filming ended in June 2026, and the German-French-Turkish co-production is now in post-production with a release pencilled in for 2027.
The story centres on Amir, a postman whose teenage son is killed when a rocket hits the city. His wife, Nazira, stops speaking and withdraws from the household, and the family slowly begins to break apart. Amir holds on to his delivery round as the last part of his day that still feels normal, while Kabul becomes more dangerous with each passing week. Barmak wrote the screenplay with Asad Hussain.
Although the film is set in the Afghan capital, very little of it was shot there. Most of the production took place in Iraqi Kurdistan, where the cities of Duhok and Erbil stood in for Kabul. The team then moved to Germany for the closing scenes, which were filmed on a landfill site for construction waste in the north of Berlin. Zamarin Wahdat served as director of photography, and the cast is led by Hussein Hassan Ali, Mina Kavani, Bahar Naghibi and Diman Zandi. A group photograph from the set shows Barmak with Wahdat, producer Mehmet Aktaş and actors Hussein Hassan Ali, Bahar Naghibi and Diman Zandi, alongside members of the crew such as continuity supervisor Nubar Hamamci and line producer Fatma Parmaksiz.
Epik Filmproduktion and mîtosfilm, the company run by Hüseyin Tabak and Mehmet Aktaş, are producing alongside the French outfit l’atelier documentaire. The financing reads like a map of European public support: ZDF and ARTE are on board as broadcasters, while funding has come from the German Federal Film Board (FFA), Film- und Medienstiftung NRW, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the German Federal Film Fund (DFFF) and France’s CNC. Le Pacte is handling international sales, and AF-Media will release the film in German cinemas.
Barmak has been making films since the 1980s and remains best known internationally for Osama, which won the Golden Globe for best foreign language film in 2004. The Postman returns him to the city at the heart of that earlier success, this time looking back to the early 1990s. The producers have not yet named a festival for the world premiere, and a theatrical date has still to be set. Further details are expected once post-production is complete.
