Latest news with #Kazemi
Hindustan Times
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
A thaw in Iran-Canada ties? Tehran says ‘ready for talks' to restart relations
Iran has stated that it is ready for talks with Canada to restart diplomatic relations. Canada severed its diplomatic ties with Iran in 2012, citing the state's support for the Assad regime in Syria, terrorism and fear for the safety of Canadian diplomats among many other reasons. 13 years after this decision, Tehran has stated it is ready for talks to restart the diplomatic ties which were "unilaterally" frozen by Canada. During a media briefing in Tehran, Esmail Baghaei, a spokesperson for the foreign ministry, said that Iran is ready to talk with Canada, as long as Ottawa makes the first move. "The relationship was frozen unilaterally by Canada, not by Iran. And we never welcomed that decision because we think that decision was not for the benefit of either of the two nations," he was quoted as saying by CBC News. "I think the first step they have to take is to unravel the many sanctions and restraints that they have imposed on themselves and on our bilateral relations," the spokesperson added further. Diplomatic relations between Iran and Canada were established in 1956 and 1959 with the opening of the respective embassies. However, following the Iranian revolution of 1979, ties between Iran and Canada hit a snag, ultimately leading to the closure of the Canadian embassy in Tehran in 1980. In 2003, ties between Canada and Tehran hit a major roadblock after the killing of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian freelance journalist. Kazemi, who stayed in Montreal, was arrested while taking pictures outside a prison in Tehran during a student protest. Three weeks after her detention, she was killed. While Iran has stated her death was accidental, a former military staff physician revealed that her death was due to physical torture during custody. This information was revealed after the former military officer, Shahram Azam, applied for asylum in Canada in 2004. Since Kazemi's death, Iran and Canada have accused each other of human rights abuses. In 2010, Canada imposed economic sanctions and restricted all financial transactions and activities which were beneficial to the Iranian government. In 2012, then Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird announced that Canada would be severing its ties with Iran. The Canadian government, then led by Stephen Harper, cited Tehran 's ambition for a nuclear weapon, its non-compliance with the UN, support for the dictatorship of the now ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and human rights abuses, among other reasons.
Chicago Tribune
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘A Lie of the Mind' is a Chicago-style treatment of Sam Shepard's most difficult play
With 'Fool for Love' playing at the Steppenwolf Theatre and now 'A Lie of the Mind' at the thriving Raven Theatre, Chicago is having something of a Sam Shepard revival. The late, great bard of the lonely American prairie and desert went out of favor here for a while; it's good to have his work back and being interpreted by a younger generation of artists. I found Steppenwolf's 'Fool for Love' overly styled and tentative, but that's far from the case with director Azar Kazemi's Raven production, filled with compelling young actors such as Ian Maryfield, Arash Fakhrabadi, John Drea and Gloria Imseih Petrelli going for broke in Raven's intimate theater. Now 40 years old, 'A Lie of the Mind' started out as a three-act, four-hour play, although Raven is using the revised version, first produced by the New Group in 2010, that clocks in at around 2 hours and 40 minutes — still nearly twice as long as 'Fool for Love.' The piece has accurately been described as the final episode in a quintet of familial dramas that also includes Shepard's 'Curse of the Starving Class,' 'Buried Child,' 'True West' and 'Fool for Love' and it's probably fair to say that it's Shepard's last great 20th century masterpiece. His 'Long Day's Journey Into Night,' kinda. All of those plays deal with broken families and romantic relationships, some subject to healing, some not. All of them are about the disconnect between the sparse natural environment in these United States and the human craving for intimacy. And all deal with American iconography: more specifically, the nation's foundational reliance on mythology and self-dramatization and the largely detrimental impact of all of that on, well, just making love and having children and trying to keep the wolf from the door. Whatever else I have to say about Kazemi's show here, this is a most serious production, one that understands this great writer strikingly well and that wrestles admirably with what is, I think, his most difficult work. All the characters in 'Lie of the Mind,' even the parental figures played here by Meighan Gerachis (in an exceptional stretch of her long career in Chicago theater) and Rom Barkhordar, who plays Baylor, the classic brutal Shepard father figure. The plot? It involves a young marriage where there has been horrific domestic abuse and both parties, aggressor and victim, have gone back to their original families in a kind of psychic retreat. Things go from there. Thus the piece tells the story of two agonized families striving for, oh, I don't know, coherence? Forgiveness? Self-awareness? Revenge? Redemption? Probably all of the above. Compared to other productions, which have fused much music into the show and used a sparser and more experimental or meta visual aesthetic, Kazemi situates the play more in terms of domestic realism or, if you like, a storefront Chicago gestalt. That's fair enough, especially given the resources at Raven, and it often works very well in terms of helping us identify with these struggling characters and reminded us of the autobiographical underpinning of all this man's plays. At other times, though, it fights Shepard's more surreal inclinations, especially as the play goes on and its non-realistic elements become more and more pervasive. The show's strength is the potent and courageous ensemble acting, as adroitly and generously directed by Kazemi (it will get yet better too). Its weakness is an intermittent lack of vulnerability and an occasional disinclination to leave all of that behind and pull out individual characters who have figured out that their travails flow from the difficulty of stopping American family life from turning into a Sam Shepard play. Chris Jones is a Tribune critic. cjones5@ When: Through March 22 Where: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes
