The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“No other film has depicted the painful repetitiveness of an immigrant’s life in such candid detail.”

Ehsan Khoshbakht, Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022

One of the most exciting developments in recent film restoration is the newly available work of Sohrab Shahid Saless, a filmmaker whose transnational status—neither a careerlong member of the New Iranian or New German Cinemas—has often made him an overlooked figure in film history. Perhaps no director has explored with greater rigour and sensitivity the routines of daily existence, the way work imposes itself on life, and the way these daily cycles only retrospectively look like ​“events.” Far From Home, one of three early films Shahid Saless co-wrote with Helga Houzer, his partner at the time, portrays a household of Turkish gastarbeiter (or guest workers) in West Germany. As Shahid Saless’s opening title card promises, it is a film that contains the misery of isolation—the limits of language and social graces and racist exclusion. It’s also a film of surprising beauty, whether through subtly inventive camera set-ups, shades of the colour green, or brief, unmelodramatic gestures of warmth.

In Turkish and German with English subtitles

“A peaceful and powerful contemplation on the pace of life in conditions of migration and exile.”

Lucy Sternbach, Screen Slate

“Saless’s darkly luminous, dystopic, and dysphoric films point to a deep undercurrent … [As with] Amir Naderi and Luis Buñuel, the empowering function of filmmaking helped him cope with deterritorialization by creating new narrative homes.”

Hamid Naficy, “The Cinema of Sohrab Shahid Saless”