In a 1979 report to the Goethe Institut, the German filmmaker Herbert Achterbusch wrote: ‘The name of the Iranian director, who makes the best German films, is Sohrab Shahid Saless’ (Achternbusch [1979] 1988, 211). When Sohrab Shahid Saless relocated to Germany in late 1974 he found himself in the midst of one of the most vibrant new filmmaking movements in Europe. Led by the likes of Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Helma Sanders Brahms and Volker Schlöndorff, the New German Cinema had reached a high point, garnering recognition and prizes at film festivals around the world. Shahid Saless was no stranger to the power of festivals and prizes to boost the careers of innovative auteurs, or Autoren as they were called in Germany. Indeed, the first two feature films he produced in Iran – A Simple Event (Yek Ettefaq-e Sadeh, 1974) and Still Life (Tabi’at-e Bijan, 1974) – had received many accolades and awards earlier that year at the Berlin Film Festival and this recognition offered him a lifeline when it became clear that he would not be able to continue his career in his homeland due to increasing pressure from the government. After he began making films in Germany, his work continued to be much sought after by international film festivals. However, despite managing to relaunch his career successfully in Germany, he struggled to find himself either professionally or personally ‘at home’ there. During his first year in Germany, he wrote and directed Far From Home (In der Fremde, 1975), a film about a Turkish guest-worker living in Berlin. Shahid Saless began to see his own struggles of finding a secure home reflected through Hussein (Parviz Sayyad), the protagonist of that film. As a filmmaker who, back in Iran, had been a founding member of the New Film Group, a collective of Iranian New Wave filmmakers striving to launch a new art-film movement, he was very keen to find a new home and secure his ‘membership’ of the New German Cinema.

In this chapter, I aim to situate Shahid Saless within the context of the cultural and economic policies of West Germany that enabled the New German Cinema to arise and, for a time at least, to thrive.