International Premiere of 4K restoration!
Recently restored, Sohrab Shahid Saless’ Time of Maturity reveals — with a sparse, unhurried, deeply generous approach — the harsh realities of the world as seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, sharing a room with his sex worker mother in Berlin’s Wedding district.
Among the first films produced by the still-underappreciated Sohrab Shahid Saless after his mid-’70s migration from Iran to Germany, Time of Maturity is the latest restoration from the Berlin-based Shahid Saless Archive and — as with each title that emerges from the auteur’s revered but long-inaccessible body of work — it confirms his position as a major figure of modern and diasporic cinema.
Perhaps appropriately for a filmmaker then finding his place in his new home, his film’s narrative is grounded in a tale of belonging and increased awareness of the realities of the world. A young boy (whose name is seldom spoken), aged nine, shares an austere room in Berlin’s Wedding district with his mother, a sex worker who typically returns late at night, preparing her son’s lunch a few hours before he leaves for school. Reinforced by an oppressively ticking clock, charged silences, and the film’s formal repetitions, the duo’s routine is defined by the precarity of his mother's occupation, which likewise cleaves their life in two: his belonging to the day, hers, the night.
As she hustles to survive, so does he in his efforts to save for a bicycle, an ambition that has him running errands for various neighbours. Gradually, and subtly, his interactions with those around him expand his understanding of social and cultural dynamics, including their at-times cruel dimensions.
Shot in crisp black-and-white and notable not only for its progressive and non-judgmental depiction of sex work, of childhood, and a then rarely seen, diverse area of Berlin, Time of Maturity is a daring film of unwavering clarity.
ANDRÉA PICARD
Content advisory: mature themes, coarse language
Time of Maturity by Sohrab Shahid Saless had its theatrical premiere at the 29th Locarno Film Festival in 1976. As part of the transnational SHAHID SALESS ARCHIVE project, which was initiated by film historian Vivien Buchhorn, the complete works of Sohrab Shahid Saless have been restored continually since 2021.The digital restoration of Time of Maturity was carried out with the support of the German Film Heritage funding program – financed by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), the federal states and the FFA. The source material for the 4K scan was the original picture and optical sound negative from the archive of PROVOBIS Gesellschaft für Film und Fernsehen mbH. © PROVOBIS FILM/SHAHID SALESS ARCHIVE
Screenings
TIFF Lightbox 4