Podeli : One of the biggest names in contemporary theater, renowned director Milo Rau, will open this year’s Bitef Festival, which runs from September 25 to October 4 in Belgrade. Milo Rau (born in 1977 in Berne) is a writer, director and author. He is a former Artistic Director of NTGent (Belgium) and has been Artistic Director of the Wiener Festwochen since 2023.
Rau studied sociology as well as German and Romance language and literature in Paris, Berlin and Zurich under scholars including Pierre Bourdieu and Tzvetan Todorov. Critics have called him, among other things, the “most influential” (Die Zeit), “most distinguished” (Le Soir), “most interesting” (De Standaard), “most controversial” (La Repubblica), “most scandalous” (New York Times) and “most ambitious” (The Guardian) artist of our time. “So far, he has directed over 50 plays, films, books, and projects.
His theater productions have been showcased at all the major international festivals, including Bitef. His play Orestes in Mosul opened the 53rd Bitef, and at the 50th Bitef, he presented Compassion: The History of the Machine Gun. This year, his acclaimed production Antigone in the Amazon will be featured in the main program.
This will also mark his first personal appearance at Bitef,” said Nikita Milivojevic, the festival’s artistic director and co-curator. Dramaturge and festival co-curator Tijana Grumic added that Rau chose to set Antigone in the context of the Amazon for a specific reason. “For the purposes of this production, Rau and his team traveled to Brazil, where capitalism and fire devour forests and nature, and where one percent of the population owns 45 percent of the land, and produced this piece in collaboration with MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra), the largest landless workers’ movement,” she said.
The slogan of this year’s edition of Bitef is „Beauty Will (Not) Save the World.“ The main program will introduce to the Belgrade audience as many as 10 productions, hailing from Germany, France, Switzerland, Bolivia, Brazil, the Netherlands, Belgium, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia..
