‘IT WAS AS IF IT WAS AN OPEN AIR STUDIO’

Sohrab Shahid Saless: he is one of the most important figures in modern Iranian film, and nowadays a real unknown quantity in New German Cinema. Saless was born in Tehran in 1944 and died in 1998 in Chicago; he spent his whole life working as a transnational screenplay author and director. During the 1960s, he studied film production and drama in Austria and France, and shot numerous films for cinema and television, as well as documentaries in Iran, the Federal Republic of Germany and the former Czechoslovakia. He then moved to the USA in the 1990s but was not able to produce films there. Since 2016, retrospectives in cities including Berlin (2016) and Munich (2017) have meant that the work of this award-winning Iranian filmmaker, who had been unjustly forgotten in Germany, is now being rediscovered, as well as discovered for the first time.

Two films, which Saless produced and which the following interview is about, were either predominantly or completely filmed in the former Czechoslovakia: Hans – A Young Man in Germany (Hans – Ein Ɉunge in Deutschland, 1985) was produced in the spring and autumn of 1983. Saless based this black-and-white film on the 1977 novel, The Blue Hour (Die blaue Stunde), an autobiographical work by the author Hans Frick (1930–2003). Hans, the protagonist, lives in Nazi Germany with his mother, a factory worker, and his seriously ill grandmother in Frankfurt am Main. The family experiences the war years here: bombs fall, forced labourers are dragged through the streets and neighbours harass the boy. And the reason for this? Hans's father, who he does not know, is a Jew – so both mother and son live in fear of denunciation. When Hans sees Gestapo in front of the apartment, he flees the city and manages to survive until he is intercepted by incoming American soldiers.

The Willow Tree (Der Weidenbaum) was shot in the spring and summer of 1984 and is a film version of the short story of the same name written by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, which was first published in 1883.