Theater Director Ali Rafiee to Receive Hafez Statuette

Veteran theater director Ali Rafiee will be honored at the 18th Hafez Celebration in Tehran on August 13.

According to the public relations office of the ceremony, the Hafez Statuette will be awarded to Rafiee, 80, for a lifetime of artistic career in  performing arts, ISNA reported on its Persian website.

Also a cinema director and stage designer, he received his BA and MA in sociology and a PhD in theater from the prestigious Sorbonne University in Paris.

He began his career in acting and directing in France and continued the same after returning to Iran in the early 1970s. On his return, he was appointed director of City Theater Complex and the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (now known as Tehran University of Art). Later he started teaching theater at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Tehran.

Rafiee has made three films and staged over 15 plays including “Antigone” written by the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles, “Crime and Punishment” by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Blood Wedding” by Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca and “Romeo and Juliet” by English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.

The last play he directed was “Memories and Nightmares of a Clothes Keeper of Mirza Taghi Khan,” staged at Vahdat Hall in 2015. The play is about Amir Kabir (1807-1852), chief minister of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (former king of Persia) and was warmly welcomed.

Special set designs and lighting are among the characteristics of his works. In his last play, he used an aqua setting with 4,500 liters of water, giving a unique feature to the play.

The first 16 editions of Hafez Celebration were organized by film producer and editor-in-chief of Picture World Magazine Ali Moallem who died in March 2017. His son, Omid, took over and organized the 17th and 18th editions of the annual ceremony which is the first private cinematic event in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, presenting the best of Iran cinema and TV.