Goethe-Institut London to review Sohrab Shahid-Saless films

TEHRAN – (Iranart)- The Goethe-Institut London plans to review works by Sohrab Shahid-Saless, a seminal figure of the Iranian New Wave cinema, during a program that will begin on November 4.

Shahid-Saless left his homeland in the mid-1970s to pursue his career in West Germany, where he made an original lineup of works for cinema and television.

“Far From Home”, the opening film of the program titled “Sohrab Shahid Saless: Exiles”, is about the life of the Turkish guest worker Husseyn in 1970s Berlin.

The program, which is organized in collaboration with the Munich Film Museum, will go on with screening “Black and White” and “A Simple Event” on November 9.

“Still Life”, “Utopia”, “Coming of Age”, “Order”, “The Willow Tree”, “Hans – a Young Man in Germany”, “Diary of a Lover”, “Changeling” and “The Long Vacation of Lotte H. Eisner” will also be screened.

The program will come to an end with a one-day conference on Shahid-Saless. The U.S.-based Iranian scholar Professor Hamid Naficy of the Northwestern School of Communication will be the keynote speaker at the conference. 
 
“In meditative but searing images of everyday life, his slow-paced films tell simple stories that speak forcefully to the traumas of homelessness and displacement,” the organizers have written about Shahid-Saless, who called himself a “guest worker” after moving to West Germany.

“They are more urgent than ever today,” they noted.

Azadeh Fatehrad and Nikolaus Perneczky are the curators of the program that is also supported by the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre, Kingston University, and the Iran Heritage Foundation and Arts Council of England.