‘The high quality of Theater shows in province is surprising’: Roozbeh Hosseini on the 2024 FITF

The Iranian theater competition includes three sections: "Stage Review", "News" and "Regional Winners". Hossein Masafer Astaneh, Mahmoudreza Rahimi and Roozbeh Hosseini were the members of the selection committee for stage Review competition.

 A playwright and stage director, Roozbeh Hosseini said about the method of evaluating the applicant's performances: Many filmed stage productions were sent to the secretariat to participate in the  stage review competition, but unfortunately, approximately 20% of them did not have the sufficient sound and image quality to fairly evaluate the show in terms of audio and visual.

He went on to say : "I hope that theater troupes  will pay attention to the quality of the films sent from their works for next year, because due to time limitation, some works cannot be watched two or three times."

Hosseini explained about quality of performance and their theme: "The quality of the shows was relative. It can be said that the works were very good and very bad, and most of them were average. Average works did not offer anything new in form, content and drama. In fact, it should be said that there were works with few features, unfortunately some of them were among the shows performed in Tehran."

Roozbeh Hosseini emphasized that new stage artists choose tried rules in theater type, performance method and the cast; Therefore, they have nothing new to say in terms of form and creative content.

He said about the Positive features of the submitted works:"For all its shortcomings, the genre diversity is incredibly satisfying. We had a variety of genres and content in this section; Even with a mostly average level.  This proves that the nature of our theater is not dependent on specific content or single genre. Also, we are witnessing all kinds of social, economic, cultural and indigenous approaches in different forms. “

This author pointed out the gap between playwrights and theater directors: "Many theater directors do not read books at all. More than 10 publishing houses are busy publishing plays, but none of these plays which are often the respectable works of the young generation of theater writers, are performed. Young directors persistently write their own plays, or claim new forms and techniques, They look for plays performed by other directors. " The artist also clearly said about the criteria and characteristics of their selection: “According to the emphasis of the president and artistic director of FITF, in the first stage, we paid more attention than ever to the quality and then to the variety of works.”