This podcast is a conversation with contemporary Iranian Director Kiamoars Moradi regarding his recent theatrical performance “Home” here in Dallas, Texas. As a professional theater director, Kiomars Moradi deploys the magical realism genre in which magical elements blend with well-known contemporary issues of Iran to allow a deeper understanding of the complex realities of the Iranian society, a society caught between modernity, tradition and revolutionary values. The magical realism genre is also an effective tool for Moradi to overcome and dodge Iran’s state-censorship through a more politically subtle genre. Kiomars Moradi’s Home narrates current social tensions, cultural cleavages and economic difficulties of the Iranian society through the story of a middle class family in the capital city of Tehran. Home displays a striking and vivid depiction of how family bonds in the Iranian society have been deeply influenced and harmed by a prevalent cultural, ideological and religious gap between two generations of Iranian parents and children. The parents belong to Iran’s 1979 revolutionary-era followed immediately by the eight year 1980 Iran-Iraq War, and the kids are the current generation of Iranians born after these turbulent times of ideology and warfare propaganda.
