Mario Banushi is a multi-talented young actor and director from Albania, who lives and works in Athens. In the main programme of the 57th Bitef, the Belgrade audience will be able to watch his second play Goodbye, Lindita produced by the National Theater of Greece.
Inspired by the history of the Balkans and its funerary customs and practices, this play brings a deeply intimate story about dealing with the loss of a loved one in a subtle and striking way. Following the events in a Balkan family home, the director builds a unique poetics of his artistic expression and asks the question of what it means to say goodbye. How does life continue after the death of those we love?
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After a series of successful performances and reviews in Greece, Banushi's piece begins its international life precisely at the 57th Bitef, after which it embarks on a European tour. In this way, Bitef continues one of the missions of the festival, which is to promote new names in an international context.
Goodbye, Lindita is on the program on Thursday, October 5th (8:00 p.m.) on the "Mira Trailović" stage of the Atelje 212 theater.
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Also in the main programme, the audience will have the opportunity to watch the Hungarian play Singing Youth produced by the House of Contemporary Art Trafo from Budapest. The author team of this piece, which has an extremely successful festival life, consists of Judit Böröcz, Bence György Pálinkás, and Máté Szigeti. They employ an interesting perspective in examining the problem of building a national stadium (Puskás Aréna) in Hungary.
This stadium, dedicated to the nation, was built on the site of an earlier stadium that was dedicated to the people. At the former entrance to the stadium there was a sculpture by a Greek sculptor, dissident Makris Agamemnon. Named Singing Youth, it survived the period when many works of art created during the socialist era were removed from public space, while the stadium dedicated to the people remained.
This operetta, whose libretto is composed of politicians' statements in the public space and the media, testifies, just like the sculpture, to the last seventy years of turbulent Hungarian history and how art and music were simultaneously a key factors both in promoting the ideology of the ruling structures and in the rebellion of the youth.
In this Bitef, Singing Youth will have two performances in the Bitef Theater - on October 8th and 9th, both starting at 8 p.m.
Strength, Don't Let Yourself Be Anyone's
This year's Bitef, the 57th one, will be held between the 3rd and the 10th of October. Under the slogan "Strength, Don't Let Yourself Be Anyone's", the festival audience will have the opportunity to see nine plays in the main programme, that come from Germany, Lithuania, Hungary, Sweden, Greece, Burkina Faso, Belgium, and Serbia.
The festival has traditionally been supported by the Secretariat for Culture of the City of Belgrade and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, as well as the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Goethe Institute. New Moment New Ideas Company, the festival's creative agency, is a partner and friend of Bitef. Festival partners this year are Generali Insurance Srbija, Erste Bank a.d. Novi Sad, as well as the festival friends Coca-Cola Hellenic Serbia, 1664 Blanc and Somersby, Rajićeva Shopping Center, and the Halo Creative team.
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