In 1998 the film world mourned the death of Sohrab Shahid-Saless, a leading talent of the new Iranian cinema of the 1970s who later lived and made internationally acclaimed films in West Germany. Born in 1944 in Iran, Sohrab Shahid-Saless studied filmmaking in Vienna and Paris, then made more than twenty documentaries in Iran before his first feature, A Simple Event (1973), won the Grand Prize at the Tehran Film Festival. That same year, Shahid-Saless was one of sixteen directors who turned away from the Iranian commercial film industry to form The New Film Group, a filmmaking cooperative dedicated to making quality films without artistic restrictions. A Simple Event had signalled the direction The New Film Group would take.