Sohrab Shahid Saless - An Iranian Filmmaker in Berlin

The Iranian filmmaker Sohrab Shahid Saless moved to Germany in 1974 following the enormous success of his first two Iranian-made feature films at the Berlin Film Festival earlier that year. The next few years were a period of great uncertainty for him as he had to continually negotiate his residency status, which was also dependent upon having a firm contract to make another film. Archival documents, including correspondence with various German ministers (West and East), the Ausländerpolizei (Immigration Police), his lawyers and producers reveal much about the various ways in which he positioned himself variously as an exile or at times even a ‘guestworker’ or Gastarbeiter. As
such he began to closely identify with the protagonists of the first feature film that he made in Germany, FAR FROM HOME (IN DER FREMDE, 1975) and this moniker became for him a kind of public persona. Shahid Saless went on to make thirteen feature films for cinema and television in Germany.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, his films were in high demand at international film festivals and in 1992 he won the German Television prize for ROSES FOR AFRICA (ROSEN FÜR AFRIKA). Despite this prolific output and recognition during his lifetime, Shahid Saless barely rates a mention in any of the key texts on German cinema of the period. My paper seeks to begin to place Shahid Saless back into this history. It will examine not just the aesthetic and thematic qualities of his first German-made feature film with which he once said he intended to ‘place a finger on the wounds of society’, but will also assess the ways in which Shahid Saless was able to effectively negotiate the German film and television funding landscape.

This paper will focus on Shahid Saless' first year in Berlin, tracing the personal, professional and social context in which he produced his film IN DER FREMDE. It will focus particularly on Shahid Saless' self-inscription as a kind of Gastarbeiter and also on the sense of 'Elend' (misery or despair) that infuses the film.