This chapter deals with the topic of curatorship, applied to the case study of Sohrab Shahid Saless. It explores specific issues at stake when working on a transnational author, from an economic, geopolitical and ideological point of view. Possibly, the general frame of the art of curatorship happens to be film history as such, so that a strong articulation between academic work and cultural policy has to be made to understand the significance of screening the films made by Sohrab Shahid Saless.

Among the tasks of a film curator, one of the main issues is to allow people to discover or rediscover great movies that have been forgotten or repressed, and to share them with a larger audience. Such a mission may seem to be obvious, but it can be overshadowed by different drives as well as by topical trends or institutional constraints. While he/she is always and necessarily negotiating with existing institutions and between various demands, even a freelance curator tries to maintain an independence from them. Working on a single filmmaker is rather common in institutions like cinémathèques, in the tradition of Henri Langlois retrospectives, huge programmes showing the largest number of films by an individual filmmaker (according to the politique des auteurs). But curators need to face another issue, linked to his/her very reason to exist: the making of a programme as a hermeneutic proposal – another path that is very important if we are to understand, for instance, Langlois's work. Programming as a gesture – that is, film curatorship – will be based on ideas, feelings and even chance, which allow the audience to establish links between various films. In a word, making a programme may be a form of ‘montage’, from the curatorial point of view and/or from the point of view of the audience. When working on a single author, the active role of curator seems to disappear but another risk arises, which needs to be confronted. I could call it the ‘identifying temptation’: that is, the tendency to appropriate the author's oeuvre, at best because of a strong theoretical idea of it or an outstanding knowledge of it.