Hearing

Four women in a female dormitory in Tehran. A voice that shouldn’t have been heard. An interrogation. Fear, guilt and banished youth. Five years on from his dream-like “Amid the clouds”, the award-winning Iranian director and dramatist Amir Reza Koohestani returns to the Onassis Stegi with a devastatingly pared-down work which explores the Kafkaesque reality of life in his homeland.

“Hearing” addresses freedom and its repression through the example of an Iranian ‘crime’: listening to a ‘forbidden’ male voice in a female hall of residence in Tehran.

The source and inspiration for the play is the 1989 documentary “Homework” by the outstanding Iranian film-maker, Abbas Kiarostami, which critiqued the Iranian educational system using interviews with terrified pupils from a Tehran primary school. Taking this film as a reference point, Koohestani presents something similar in “Hearing”: university as a court-martial, youth as a prison.

Freedom of speech is identified with freedom of existence in a mysterious, poetic production that unfolds in the shadows among silence and whispering. A key element is a helmet-mounted camera, a prop which alludes equally to a dystopian science fiction film and the repressive conditions current in Iran.

“Hearing” was written during a residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (October 2014 - March 2015) in Stuttgart, Germany