RADU AFRIM

Director

Collaborator

Personal data

Radu Afrim, one of the most appreciated, awarded, and innovative Romanian directors, was born in the town of Beclean, Bistrița Năsăud, where he still resides, despite his numerous productions at theaters in the capital and across the country. He graduated from the Faculty of Letters at Babeș-Bolyai University in 1995, was a professor for five years, but followed his true calling and studied Theater, graduating in 2000 from the same university in Cluj-Napoca. Radu Afrim's creative portfolio includes dozens of performances and numerous awards, including three UNITER awards for Best Director and several important international accolades, such as the Grand Prix of the Grange de Dorigny Festival in Lausanne, Switzerland, for two consecutive years, and the "Coup de Coeur de la Presse" award at the "Off" Festival in Avignon. His clear preference is for contemporary texts, which he often adapts, especially when it comes to prose. His Plan B is to write his own scripts, and he has done so several times with success. However, there are exceptions to this rule. One of his highly successful productions was in 2019 at the National Theatre "I.L. Caragiale" in Bucharest, "Three Sisters" after Chekhov, a famous Chekhovian text adapted by Afrim for contemporary and young audiences. Prior to "Three Sisters", Afrim's choice was the novel "The Forest of the Hanged" by Rebreanu, which he dramatized in 2018 to mark the Centenary of the Union of 1918. The production received multiple nominations at the 2019 UNITER Gala (Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Set Designer, Best Show) and an award for Best Supporting Actress – Natalia Călin for her role as Doamna Bologa. Other remarkable productions bearing Radu Afrim’s unmistakable signature include "The Retro Bird Crashes into a Block and Falls on the Hot Asphalt", with an autobiographical script by Afrim; "A Flower Child Tells a Story on a Blue Background", with a script by Afrim based on a contemporary play by Molnár Ferenc; and "Why Does the Child Boil in Polenta" after a novel-poem by Aglaja Veteranyi, a Romanian-born writer from a circus family who traveled the world with the circus and eventually settled in Switzerland, where she tragically took her own life at 39. In 2020, Afrim directed "Heart and Other Meat Preparations" by Dan Coman at the National Theatre "Marin Sorescu" in Craiova, winning the UNITER Award for Best Show in 2021, followed by "Dog with Man, Dog without Man" at the same theater, based on multiple texts by contemporary authors. Radu Afrim served as the director of the Young Actor Gala (Gala HOP) for three years, from 2013 to 2015. In Constanța, Afrim directed "Scarred Hearts" in 2006, a dramatization of the novel by the great Romanian writer Max Blecher, who died at 29 from a horrific disease, bone tuberculosis, spending his life in sanatoriums. He returned to Constanța in 2022 with a show about the sea: "SEASIDE STORIES".