The camera pans nervously along the floor. Closeups show half-faces, hands on tables, or curling cigarette smoke. The fragmentary nature of these shots taken in a Tehran coffeehouse in 2001 is the starting point for stage director and playwright Azade Shahmiri’s new evening of theatre. Here she weaves the unfinished, quasi­documentary film footage by film director Hamid Jafari with subtle live moments. Three characters talk about life in present-day Iran, overcoming the constraints of time, place, and body. The stories are incomplete, open, interwoven, underscoring the permeability of identities. Like the work Voicelessness before it (2019), Quasi is a powerful reflection on the emergence of narrative; it too illustrates the need for resistance to oppressive circumstances. Another world is possible!

Approx. 2 hours
In Farsi with English and French subtitles
Aftertalk on 24.03 w/ Maryam K. Hedayat

BIO

Azade Shahmiri is a theatre artist and performance maker. She graduated in Theater Studies from the University of Tehran in 2009 and holds a Ph.D. in Art Studies. Azade’s artistic practice oscillates between theater, performance, and forms of installation. Alongside the text, the collaboration between film, video, sonic and visual materials are central to her creations. Her artistic works were presented in various theater and performance festivals across Europe and Asia in Tehran, Gwangju, Kerala, Vienna, Zurich, Basel, Edinburgh, Brussels, Berlin, Geneve, and Mannheim.

Maryam K. Hedayat is an Iranian filmmaker, curator and activist. After completing her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Antwerp, she went on to study film directing at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. She has made short films, short documentaries and video installations and focuses on themes such as gender, displacement and loss. She also writes essays and articles and has been published in rekto:verso magazine, Mo magazine, De Standaard and Deus ex Machina, among others. In 2019, Hedayat and other directors founded Wanda, an action group for womxn directors that fight for more inclusion and diversity in the film industry. She is furthermore the city curator for argos, center for audiovisual arts in Brussels. Currently Hedayat is writing the screenplay for her first feature length film for which she received funds from the Flemish Film Fund in 2021.

photo © Leila Ahmadi Abadeh