Sohrab Shahid Saless
| Sohrab Shaheed Salles | |
|---|---|
Sohrab Shaheed Salles
|
|
| Born |
28 June 1944 Tehran, Iran |
| Died | 2 July 1998 (aged 54) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Occupation | Filmmaker |
| Title | Sohrab Shaheed Salles |
Sohrab Shaheed Salles or Sohrab Shahid-Saless (Persian: سهراب شهید ثالث; June 28, 1944 in Tehran, Iran – July 2, 1998 in Chicago, Illinois) was an Iranian film director and screenwriter and one of the most celebrated figures in Iranian cinema in the 20th century. After 1976 he worked in the cinema of Germany and was an important component of the film diaspora working in the German industry.
Sohrab Shaheed Salles was born in Tehran in 1944 to a middle-class family and lived in Tehran. Shahid Saless was a storyteller as a child, with a passion for visualizing his narrations. During his teenage years, he showed an imaginative talent, writing and acting in plays with friends. In 1963, Shahid Saless left Iran for Vienna, where he attended a film school and an acting school at the same time, but his studies were discontinued there in 1967 due to a sudden diagnosis of tuberculosis. In the midst of treatment, he left for Paris to continue his film studies at the prestigious Independent Conservatory of French Cinema, and shortly thereafter, in 1968, he returned to Iran. Upon his return to Tehran, Shahid Saless began work with the Iranian Ministry of Culture as a documentary filmmaker, where he produced multiple short films and documentaries, partly on the topic of traditional dance amongst different Iranian ethnic groups.
In the course of his stay in Iran (1968–74), he produced two major feature films, Yek ettefāq-e sāda (A simple event, 1973) and Ṭabiʿat-e bijān (Still life, 1974), both of which won major international awards for their social realist depiction of life in Iran and for their innovative cinematographic and experimental style. In Yek ettefāq-e sāda Shahid Saless entered the film scene with a distinctive style, reporting on the daily life of a ten-year-old villager, showing his struggles to meet ends through smuggling fish. In Ṭabiʿat-e bijān the life of a meagerly paid railroad guard worker who is forced to retire for a younger guard is portrayed. In the course of this film, the distressful life of working class is depicted in a critical light. Shahid Saless also made several short films for the Ministry of Culture and Arts. He made many commissioned films on the local folkloric dances of various ethnic groups. He also started making short documentaries depicting the unnerving condition of life among the working class. Unsurprisingly, the political subversive message of these films was disliked by the government, and Shahid Saless was forced to leave the country.
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