Writer-director Sohrab Shahid Saless (1944–1998) is considered one of the driving forces behind the Iranian New Wave. Starting in the late 1960s, auteur films were being made in Iran that were strongly influenced by Italian neo-realism and postwar French cinema.
These films took a critical look at conditions in the country, portrayed them realistically, and had their own signature style.

After making two award-winning feature films, Saless, however, left Iran for political and personal reasons in 1974 and continued his work in West Germany. Having spent several years in Austria and France in the 1960s, he was fluent in both German and French. This made it easier for him to work in West Germany, where he made a total of 13 feature and documentary films by 1991. Saless not only remained true to the subjects and aesthetics he had developed in Iran, but also expanded upon them. His films focus on people who live a life of loneliness, voicelessness, and hopelessness and seem unable to escape from it.

Whether his characters are mentally ill employees in TAGEBUCH EINES LIEBENDEN (1977), humiliated prostitutes in UTOPIA (1983), or emotionally unavailable housewives in WECHSELBALG (1987), Saless approaches them in long, calm shots. This technique also enables his viewers to reflect on the oppressive living conditions that modern capitalist societies force these characters to endure.

In the late 1970s, Saless started to shift the focus of his films. He of all people, the outsider in the West German film industry, began to address more frankly and overtly certain issues that were at the forefront of West German society. Although the “Third Reich” and the Second World War lay more than three decades in the past, the process of coming to terms with them was a slow one. The broadcast of the US series HOLOCAUST in 1979 led to a fierce debate about how to deal with the Nazi past.

addressee unknown
PHOTO: BERT SCHMIDT

HANS – A young man in germany
PHOTO: BERT SCHMIDT

Amid this heated climate, Saless completed his first project after a two-year break. DIE LANGEN FERIEN DER LOTTE H. EISNER (1979) was a documentary about and featuring Eisner, a German Jewish film historian who fled to Paris when Hitler came to power. In his very next feature film, ORDER (1980), Saless again criticized society’s inertia; the protagonist, a patient at a psychiatric ward, suddenly shouts, “Auschwitz!” and is sedated by the staff. In ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN (1983), Saless ventures a controversial parallel between the discrimination and persecution of the Jewish population from 1933 onward and the treatment of foreigners by most of society during the recession and the “moral and intellectual shift” proclaimed by Helmut Kohl in the early 1980s. In HANS – A YOUNG MAN IN GERMANY (1985), based on the novel “Die blaue Stunde” (1977) by Hans Frick, Saless drew a bitter conclusion: although the Nazi regime had been defeated in 1945 and the war had ended, antisemitism lingered and persisted. In regard to this, there was no break with the past, no “zero hour”.

Sohrab Shahid Saless
PHOTO: BERT SCHMIDT

Dissatisfied with the Kohl government’s policies on immigration and film subsidies, Saless moved to Czechoslovakia in 1984, where his films were, however, censored. After Germany was reunified, he returned to that country and made his final film, ROSES FOR AFRICA (1991). In declining health and disillusioned by the direction the German film and television industry had taken, Saless moved to the United States in 1995, where he died three years later.

Sohrab Shahid Saless would have turned 80 on June 28, 2024. To mark the occasion, the Munich International Film Festival is screening ORDER, ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN, and HANS – A YOUNG MAN IN GERMANY, which deal with West Germany’s reckoning with the Nazi era and World War II. These three films are also intended to lend Saless (renewed) visibility. He remains the great unknown of New German Cinema.

The curators of the HOMMAGE: SOHRAB SHAHID SALESS series are Behrang Samsami, author of the book trilogy "Die langen Ferien des Sohrab Shahid Saless" (2023), and the German-Iranian filmmaker Daniel Asadi Faezi, who will open the series with a FilmTalk at the NS-Dokuzentrum on July 2. In addition, a photo exhibition by Monika Grube will take place at the Filmmuseum München. The artist, who was responsible for the costumes in several of Saless' films, took fascinating photos at the time.

All Pictures taken from: "Sohrab Shahid Saless. Film im Kopf" von Bert Schmidt“, Belleville Verlag