You are here: Start Programme Iran Publication. Approaches to a Life and Work" by Behrang Samsami. The cinematic oeuvre of Iranian screenwriter and director Sohrab Shahid Saless bears his own unmistakable signature. His work usually focuses on outsiders: prematurely aged children; elderly people worn out by hardship; lonely "guest workers" and refugees; mentally ill murderers; sadistic procurers and exploited prostitutes; citizens persecuted during the Nazi era because of their origins; traumatised housewives trapped within themselves.
Saless' films shed light on living conditions mainly in Iran during the Shah era and in West Germany in the s and s. He observes the characters and the conditions under which they operate with tenacious patience and a "cold gaze". Isolation and speechlessness, powerlessness and hopelessness, violence and self- hatred are ruthlessly exposed. Born into a middle-class family in Tehran, Saless went to Vienna and Paris to study film in the s.
Back in Iran, he made documentaries for the Ministry of Culture until he produced two feature films, Yek ettefaghe sadeh A Simple Event, and Tabiate bijan Still Life, , with which he became a driving force behind pre-revolutionary auteur cinema in Iran. While he is appreciated as an artist in his native country, he is hardly known in his German exile homeland, where he lived intermittently between and The trilogy The Long Holidays of Sohrab Shahid Saless is the first comprehensive account in German of the life and work of this artist, who - especially during the Cold War - repeatedly crossed linguistic, cultural and political boundaries.
The approach takes the form of a comprehensive biography Volume 1 , analyses of his feature and documentary films made since Volume 2 , interviews with companions about Saless and selected personal testimonies, such as letters and film drafts Volume 3. Wegner and Annemarie Schwarzenbach Bielefeld Co-editor of two cultural studies anthologies on modernity and its overcoming Bielefeld and Publications on migration and exile, transculturality and film.
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