Sohrab Shahid Saless's three-hour opus about the relationship between an abusive pimp and five female sex workers operating out of a brothel in 1970s West Berlin, Utopia (1982), was the director's sixth feature film made in West Germany, not counting his earlier documentaries about Lotte H. Eisner and Anton Chekhov (the latter being made in the Soviet Union). It was his eighth feature film in total, taking into account his first two award-winning Iranian films, A Simple Event (1974) and Still Life (1974), both of which established his reputation in West Germany and further afield. By the time Utopia was released, Shahid Saless had been living and working in West Germany for nearly decade, after leaving his home country of Iran in the mid-1970s, when he was prevented from working on what would have been his third feature film, Quarantine (Naficy 2001, 200–3). During that time he continued to practise and hone the techniques that would become characteristic of his filmmaking style. With specific reference to Utopia, Hamid Naficy has described these techniques as consisting of ‘a slow pace, slow acting style, and slow line delivery; a rather static and observational camera that is prone to long takes, long shots and slow pans; and a concern for the life of ordinary people and the routine practices of their everyday existence, rendered with an ironic distance’ (Naficy 2001, 200).

Narratively, Utopia also revisits the subjects to which Shahid Saless would return obsessively over and over again during his career: his concern with and empathy for society's outsiders, reflective of his own ‘outsider’ status in German society (and, to a lesser extent, even within Iran); the theme of isolation, and the alienation of his characters from their surroundings and from other people, including their own family members, as well as society at large; and the effects of trauma and its various causes, such as the death of one's mother, the loss of one's job and, particularly in Utopia, the use of violence to terrorise and control. For example, there is a scene in Utopia in which the pimp Heinz (Manfred Zapatka) punches the youngest of the sex workers, the rebellious student Susie (Gabriele Fischer), directly in the face.