Sohrab Shahid-Saless

Born 28 Jun 1944 · Qazvin, Iran

Sohrab Shahid-Saless was born in Tehran in 1944 to a middle-class family and lived in Tehran. Shahid-Saless was a storyteller as a child, with a passion for visualizing his narrations. In 1963, Shahid-Saless left Iran for Vienna, where he attended a film school and an acting school at the same time, but his studies were discontinued there in 1967 due to a sudden diagnosis of tuberculosis. In the midst of treatment, he left for Paris to continue his film studies at the prestigious Independent Conservatory of French Cinema, and shortly thereafter, in 1968, he returned to Iran. Upon his return to Tehran, Shahid-Saless began work with the Iranian Ministry of Culture as a documentary filmmaker, where he produced multiple short films and documentaries, partly on the topic of traditional dance amongst different Iranian ethnic groups. In the course of his stay in Iran (1968–74), he produced two major feature films, Yek ettefāq-e sāda (A Simple Event, 1973) and Ṭabiʿat-e bijān (Still Life, 1974), both of which won major international awards for their social realist depiction of life in Iran and for their innovative cinematographic and experimental style. Shahid-Saless also made several short films for the Ministry of Culture and Arts. He made many commissioned films on the local folkloric dances of various ethnic groups. He also started making short documentaries depic…