Sohrab Shahid Saless (Director)

Born 1944.


Sohrab Shahid Sales (1944-98) was born and raised in Iran and studied cinema in Europe. He had made a number of shorts and documentaries by the time he made A Simple Incident (1973) and radically redefined Iranian cinema with a translucent realism that was utterly unprecedented. A year later, Shahid Sales made Still Life, consolidating his position as a leading visionary of his generation. His next film, In der Fremde (Far from Home, 1975), was one of the first films to address the issue of Gastarbe-iter, or the "guest worker," in Germany. Shahid Sales continued to make his films in Germany, funded mainly by German television, and effectively lost his connection with Iranian cinema. Between 1976 and 1992, he made a total of nine films for TV in Germany. Toward the end of his life and before his premature death in Chicago, Shahid Sales moved to the United States where his health rapidly deteriorated—despite the admirable efforts of his friends to save his life. Mehrnaz Saeed Vafa made a fine documentary about his last days in Chicago, and Ali Dehbashi has edited an excellent volume of essays and other material on Shahid Sales' significance as a filmmaker.

"A Simple Incident premiered at the second Tehran International Film Festival, and caught the Iranian cinema scene off guard. No one could believe that such a simple incision of reality could carve through the fat layers of Iranian commercial cinema—pretty much dominating the mass consumption of Iranian films at the time. There were of course those who thought A Simple Incident slow and boring, its pace intolerable. But you will look in vain, even among those who liked and aggressively supported A Simple Incident, for a clue as to why they liked the film—although such standard cliches as "a true cinema" and "an honest cinema" as usual filled in the air.

A Simple Incident is a film of no incident. It is a succession of slighdy, ever so gently, mobile still lifes. There is more motion in Cezanne's paintings than in Shahid Sales' films. The character Mohammad in A Simple Incident is the son of an ailing mother and a forlorn father who makes a meager living by illegal fishing in the Caspian Sea. Mohammad's life is divided between watching his mother die, his father wither away, and his schooling that is entirely irrelevant to the rest of his life. But the film is not tragic; it is lethargic. Its sluggish pace is deliberately languid— with long takes that neither generate nor expect the slightest suggestion of life. There is a weariness about A Simple Incident, an apathetic indolence, that is neither real nor fictive—it is translucently indulgent. It allows for the spontaneity of the real to become see-through, unmitigated, unexplained, inexplicable, standing at the threshold of every and all explanations."