The following notes on Sohrab Shahid Saless’ Far from Home (aka Dar Ghorbat and Im Der Fremde) were written by Nâlân Erbil, Teaching Faculty in the Department of German, Nordic and Slavic+ at UW Madison. Far from Home screened at the Cinematheque on Friday, October 11, 2025, Presented with the support of the Kemal H. Karpat Center for Turkish Studies at UW-Madison.
By Nâlân Erbil
“Ghorbat” is untranslatable to English and evidently to German in one word as the translated titles Far from Home and In der Fremde suggest respectively. Loaned from Arabic (ﻏﺮﺑﺖ) to Persian (ﻏﺮﺑﺖ) and to Turkish (gurbet), “ghorbat” means “existential state of being away from home.” A simple bilingual dictionary search of the term dar ghorbat will lead to “in exile” or “far from home” (as in the English title) or “in a foreign country” in the German version, all of which fail to capture the complexity inherent in the word ghorbat, including physical location, emotions, and mental state among others. Even with this difficulty, the film manages to transmit the isolation embedded in ghorbat to the audience through acting and cinematography.
Multiple scenes in the factory setting show the protagonist, the “guest” worker (Gastarbeiter) Hüseyin/Husseyin (Parviz Sayyad), working a monotonously robotic job. The film begins and ends with Husseyin operating what seems like a steel cutting machine that produces an irritatingly extreme noise, a loud noise that shocks the audience before they can see the image producing it. Diligently saving his wages, Husseyin hopes to one day marry and buy a house back home, but his immediate future in Berlin is clouded by indignities he suffers at the hands of racist coworkers and painfully failed attempts at romance.
We rarely see Husseyin verbally communicating with his ethnic German co-workers. The only two instances we hear him talking at work is with a fellow worker from the same hometown and with an ethnic German clearly making fun of his eating during lunch break. Husseyin gullibly smiles and praises the food having no clue about being humiliated. A similar scene takes place when another occupant in the apartment building where he lives with other co-workers, an elderly and lonely ethnic German woman, invites him for coffee. This is also the first instance where both of these characters are attempting to communicate; earlier, Husseyin’s greetings to the woman go unanswered. She offers Husseyin coffee and snacks and shows a photo of her son who allegedly abandoned her. Husseyin, again, doesn’t understand a word of what she says and repeats “yes, yes (ja, ja)” and “good man; good man” when she tells him her son is only after her money. Such failed communication underpins the overarching theme of the film: the utter isolation of “guest” workers outside the doors of their communal apartment. No genuine communication with ethnic Germans is possible due to lack of language proficiency and perceived lower socio-economic class that these workers belong to.
One of the most celebrated filmmakers in Iranian cinema, Sohrab Shahid-Saless directed Far From Home at a pivotal period in his own life, as he transitioned from Iran to living and working in Berlin, where he would go on to shoot thirteen films over the next sixteen years. Shadid-Saless seems to have used a real worker apartment building in West Berlin, akin to tenements in NYC that house multiple workers and their families. Husseyin’s first entrance to the apartment building takes us to almost complete darkness as the windows of the first floor are closed off with what seems like wood-panels. The interior of the apartment building is dimly lit and has crumbling wall paint, but the worst is spared for the interior of Husseyin’s dwelling, an apartment/dorm that is divided into multiple units without a proper layout. It can be seen from the abundance of mold on the walls that there is limited ventilation inside the unit. The apartment/dorm is rendered claustrophobic with multiple people sharing a small space in close shots.
It takes effort to not compare Shahid-Saless’s Dar Ghorbat (1975) to Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974). While the former focuses singularly on “guest” workers, in Ali the ethnic German cleaning woman Emmy’s isolation is as important to the plot as the title character’s outsider status, if not more. In this way, Fassbinder succeeds in revealing the hypocrisy of ethnic German family and friends who abandon Emmy because she marries Ali. Arguably, one of the pitfalls of Dar Ghorbat is the potential to enforce stereotypes, unlike in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, by depicting the “guest” workers as uneducated crudes incapable of forging meaningful communication even among themselves, let alone with ethnic-Germans, who apparently see them as lesser human beings at work, on the train, and as neighbors in the same apartment building. One can almost sense justification in ethnic-German’s discriminatory attitude when Husseyin and the other “guest” workers are framed as gullible types who internalize their inferiority. For example, a roommate worker brings an ethnic German girlfriend to the communal apartment, and everyone’s attitude towards him shifts from being seen as nuisance who constantly borrows money to a respectable one.
The only woman with whom the workers are in close proximity is the wife of a “guest” worker who is responsible for all the domestic work in the dorm/apartment full of single men. We don’t even recall her name since she is indirectly referred to only when food or tea is needed. If one is not informed about the history of worker migration from Turkey to West Germany, a viewer of Dar Ghorbat might think that only male workers made the journey West, which is far from the truth. Women were recruited in comparable numbers as men, and they lived in similar dorm/apartments with fellow women workers (my own grandmother was among the first groups to be recruited circa 1963). Similarly, they worked in factories throughout the day and attended to their domestic and public life during their time off. The Turkish film Almanya Acı Vatan (1979) (The Bitter Land) by Şerif Gören provides a shift in focus to the women workers from Turkey in West Berlin. Almanya Acı Vatan, in contrast to Dar Ghorbat, shows its woman protagonist Güldane having both high intelligence, perseverance, and agency, albeit hailing from a village in Turkey.
Post WWII workers to West Germany from East and Southern Europe, and “contract” workers to East Germany from Mozambique, Vietnam, China, and Algeria, among others, rebuilt Germany’s economy without much acknowledgement to date. Even with its limitations, Dar Ghorbat provides valuable insights depicting the precarious everyday lives of former “guest” workers whose ghorbat will continue haunting Germany.