Michael is nine years old and lives in the working-class neighbourhood of Wedding, in West Berlin, in the 1970s. When his mother comes home every night, the boy<br />is already asleep, and when he leaves for school in the morning, it is she who is sleeping. Michael is saving to buy a bicycle: he runs errands and often steals from his classmates. While his mother earns a living as a prostitute, the boy struggles between escaping everyday life or living in a consumer society where there is no place for him.
Sohrab Shahid Saless
He was born in 1944 in Tehran (Iran) and died in 1998 in Chicago (United States). In 1962 he settled in Vienna, where he studied directing and drama for the theatre, and film and television. After completing his training in Paris, he returned to Iran, where he filmed around twenty shorts and documentaries for the Ministry of Culture which were characterised by some amount of social criticism. In 1974, he premiered in the official section of the Berlin Festival ‘Still Life’ and ‘A Simple Event’, his first two feature films, that influenced filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. That same year he left his country for his opposition to the Shah’s regime and settled in West Germany, where he developed the rest of his work, with titles such as ‘Time of Maturity’ (1976). In 1983 he returned to the Berlinale competition with ‘Utopia’, his last feature film.
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