Filmfest: Empfänger Unbekannt (BRD, 1983)

In the organizer's words:

Sohrab Shahid Saless' dark film essay "Recipient Unknown" from 1983 tells the story of Marianne. She leaves her family and moves to West Berlin. There she meets the unemployed Turkish architect Umran, who is skeptical about West Germany. The two move in together and Marianne is confronted with racism and discrimination for the first time in her life. In letters to her husband, Marianne comes to terms with her new reality, questions her previous life and begins to despair at the coldness of her fellow countrymen. Recession, unemployment, racism: "Recipient Unknown" tells of loneliness and oppression in calm images.

In the subsequent film discussion "Zero Hour? Sohrab Shahid Saless and the view from the outside", Dr. Behrang Samsami, journalist and author, and Daniel Wiegand, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Zurich, will talk about Saless' confrontation with the Nazi era and the anti-Semitism and racism that he witnessed and experienced as an Iranian migrant in West Germany. Sapir von Abel will moderate the event.

Sohrab Shahid Saless is considered one of Iran's most important filmmakers. He left his home country in 1974 and continued his work in exile in West Germany. Towards the end of the 1970s, he began to reflect on Germany's handling of the Nazi past in his films. Saless would have been 80 years old on June 28, 2024.