On December 29, 2018, on his way to Santiago to attend one of his shows as part of the Santiago A Mil festival, Amir Reza Koohestani was detained by border police for several hours before being sent back to Tehran. He had overstayed, by 5 days, the 90 days allowed in the Schengen area in the last six months – due to the unexplainable fact that he had been delivered two different visas.
En transit, his new creation, is based on his observations while he was detained in the transit area of Munich’s International Airport in an anonymous white space called a “waiting room”, next to other deportees from Europe. Mahin Sadri plays Amir Reza who, during his detention reads Anna Seghers’ novel Transit in order to adapt it to the theatre. In the “waiting room” different deportees appear – contemporary and past, fictional and real.
The general idea of the play combines personal experience with mise en abyme, various points of view and bridges between two periods of history. Several spoken languages – Persian, French, Portuguese, English – respond to each other, like the characters from different countries.
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