Sohrab Shahid Saless was a proponent of Iranian New Wave Cinema. He made his mark on the international film festival circuit with the enormous success of his two Iranian-made feature films: A Simple Event (Yek Ettefaq-e Sadeh, 1974) and Still Life (Tabiate Bijan, 1974), the latter winning the Silver Bear at the Berlinale in 1974. After his move to Germany in 1975, from 1975 he went on to direct a considerable body of feature-length projects, including long works for television, and culminating in the drama Roses for Africa (Rosen für Afrika, 1992), for which he was awarded the German Television Prize. While his Iranian films were concerned with the marginal lives of the downtrodden and disenfranchised, in Germany, this ‘guest-worker’ (as he would call himself) looked to the agony of homelessness and displacement, and the cruelty of the bureaucratic system: a reflection of his own life in Germany, without permanent residency status and fighting continuously for film funding.

Despite his long career in the German film industry and the acclaim that has greeted his films, Shahid Saless is rarely mentioned in scholarly literature and, except for a few short articles, there is a total lack of scholarship in English on the life and work of this visionary and transnational artist. The present book, which follows in the footsteps of the first UK retrospective of his work in 2018, promises to fill the lacunae. Iran Heritage Foundation is proud to have supported the UK retrospective and the publication of this book.