Iranian filmmakers in the diaspora form one of the most active transnational filmmaking groups in the world. However, they do not constitute a unified bloc. Their identities are varied and evolving – from exilic to diasporic, émigré, ethnic, cosmopolitan and beyond – and they work in many countries, using different modes of production and making a variety of types of film in multiple languages. This chapter discusses these issues by placing Sohrab Shahid Saless's life and films in the context of the Iranian diaspora since the 1960s and the ‘accented cinema’ that they produced.

If Masud Kimiai's movies Dash Akol (1971) and Qaisar (1969) consolidated the conventions of the popular Tough Guy movie subgenres of dash mashti and jaheli, respectively, Dariush Mehrjui's The Cow (Gav, 1969) combined some of the textual features that became characteristic of New Wave art-house movies, particularly those of Sohrab Shahid Saless, the most loyal dramatist of naturalism and realism in Iranian cinema. Reality – faithfulness to the external world – and realism – faithfulness to the conventions of classic realist cinema – were two intertwined features that set the New Wave films apart from the fantasy-driven and narratively chaotic commercial Filmfarsi works (in the Farsi language), such as the Tough Guy movies. These were foundational features of this counter-cinema, which set the reality of ordinary peoples’ lives, treated with empathy and respect, against the fiction of the official culture of spectacle perpetrated by the Pahlavi government and commercial cinema. These features gave the New Wave films their ‘luminous truth’, a phrase used by Giuseppe Ferrara to describe the Italian neorealist films (Liehm 1984, 132). The audiences for the popular Filmfarsi genre movies were ordinary people, while those for the art-house movies were predominantly more educated.

EARLY CAREER AND FILMS IN IRAN BEFORE EXILE

Sohrab Shahid Saless was born in Qazvin in 1944. He received his film production training in Austria and France, and began making films in Iran in the late 1960s as a contract employee of the Ministry of Culture and Art, earning 9,000 tomans a month. He made twenty-two documentaries and short films for the ministry, several of them about the performing arts and dance, designed for foreign distribution through Iranian embassies and consulates. Among these were Bojnurd Folkdances (Raqs ha-ye Mahhali-ye Bojnurdi, 1970), Torbate Jam Folkdances (Raqs ha-ye Mahhali-ye Torbat-e Jam, 1970) and Turkman Folkdances (Raqs ha-ye Mahhali-ye Turkaman, 1970).