Blind Runner

Iranian-born director Amir Reza Koohestani presents the audience with a powerful and poetic storytelling performance. A woman and a man on a stage: In a precise interlocking mechanism, their breathless dialogues intersect with their interior monologues, where classical Persian poetry echoes all possible transactions in the darkness of a night. With his project “Blind Runner”, which will premiere in May 2023 at kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Koohestani pierces the darkness with a dialogue on his country’s present in the context of inadequate immigration laws and Europe’s inaction regarding the Iranian government’s violent actions against its own people.

A man and his wife, who is currently in jail as a political prisoner, have promised each other to run every night on both sides of the prison wall where she is being held. Before her arrest, they had been training to run for months as part of a plan to leave Iran and reach England. They prepared to cover the 27 km of tunnel in the only possible period, the five hours between the last train in the evening and the first of the following day. But their training towards a new life was interrupted a week before their departure by the woman’s arrest.

Amir Reza Koohestani writes the story of their long-distance training on both sides of the wall, taking it as a starting point to reflect on contemporary Iranian society – a run that continues despite everything.