A naqqali performance selected to go on stage during the 19th Traditional and Ritual Theater Festival will recount the story of war heroin Farangis Heidarpur.
“Farangis Tale” will be performed in the form of naqqali, a dramatic style of storytelling dedicated to stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and other epic Persian stories.
The story is about Heidarpur’s confrontation with Iraqi soldiers after their village, Evazin near the border between Iran and Iraq, was invaded during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
“It is an amazing story and I have done in-depth research to stage the performance,” the Abadan-based performer Hura Tila who is a naqqal, someone who performs naqqali, told the Persian service of ISNA on Tuesday.
“What happened to Farangis in the war is an epic story, and naqqali is the best medium to illustrate it,” she added.
“There are lessons to learn in the epic,” she noted.
Heidarpur’s story has been covered in her memoirs “Farangis” written by Mahnaz Fattahi. It was published by Sureh-Mehr in 2015.
Earlier in 2017, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei praised the book in a recommendation.
“A significant and untold portion of the war stories can be observed in the memoirs of this brave and devoted lady,” Ayatollah Khamenei wrote.
“Brave lady Farangis has conversed with us with her strong spirit, the honest and kindly language of a villager, and the genuinely pleasant feelings of a woman. She has also shown us an unknown and important area of the imposed war geography in detail,” he added.
The 19th Traditional and Ritual Theater Festival will open in the central Iranian city of Kashan on August 11.
Performances will then continue in Tehran until August 17.
Tehran Times