Sohrab Shahid Saless

Two streams of Iranian film history flow into (1973). The first is the short-lived, pre-revolutionary “New Group” movement that sought to eschew the conventions of the commercial cinema of the time (after producing a few notable films, the group collapsed under pressure from censorial government forces). The second is the modernist “New Wave” familiar to those who followed the re-ascendance of Iranian cinema on the world stage in the ’90s—one that , with its cogent philosophical structure, creative use of non-actors, and unembellished mise en scene, clearly set the stage for. Its director, Sohrab Shahid Saless, was once a prominent filmmaker on the world scene, having won the Silver Bear in Berlin for his second film, , in 1974. Inspired by his success at the Berlinale, he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany, where he became a key, if somewhat marginalized, figure in its cinema of ’70s and ’80s. That his work remains for the most part forgotten, completely underrepresented on virtually all forms of home video, and revived only intermittently and almost never as a whole, is a particularly potent reminder of the discoverable richness that lies out there in the cinephilic dark. His three(semi-)well-known— and from his Iranian period, and (1983) from his time in Germany—on first glance represent an open-and-shut case: all three are grim masterpieces, sufficiently great to encapsulate this bi-national figure’s free, concrete, unique philosophy of cinema and the world. Only when digging further do we uncover films