Iran Theater-Amir Reza Kohestani’s Hearing will go on stage at The Ingmar Bergman International Theatre Festival 2018 which will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman's birth.

Hearing will run on August 27th and 28th in the Stockholm, Sweden.

Amir Reza Koohestani is the playwright and director. Hearing was written during a residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (October 2014 – March 2015) in Stuttgart, Germany.

 

Amir Reza Koohestani told about writing the play:” About a year or two ago, when I was watching Abbas Kiarostami’s Homework for the second (or third) time, I thought that these little boys who in response to Kiarostami’s supposedly simple questions such as “What is encouragement?” or “Have you done your homework?”, stare at the camera and ceiling, looking dizzy and hazy, seem so weird. I don’t want to “say” sick, but if nowadays a child gets this much afraid of being alone with a camera group in a closed room that he cries and asks them not to close the door, certainly they would take him to a therapist and psychiatrist.

 

But amid the war days, under Saddam’s missile strikes which the main aim was downrightly resistance and survival, there were not much people, except some such as Kiarostami, who thought about children’s mental and emotional health.

 

A while after,I heard that one of the film’s kids named Bahman, was Kiarostami’s own son.

I remembered that in the first meeting I had with Kiarostami, when he heard that I was born in 1978, he said my son is your age too. Therefore, these kids are an image of my child hood too. I looked like this too (If I wasn’t worse). So how come that a person with this kind of childhood intends to recognize his society’s best, as an intellectual?

 

In this play I want to find a connection between our fate today and that childhood and adolescence which we lived during the war and after that. Though the difference is that unlike Kiarostami’s film, I want to pursue female roles.”

Mona Ahmadi, Ainaz Azarhoush, Elham Korda, Mahin Sadri will play the roles.