The Negotiation (trailer), 2010, 38″, HDV, sound, color & b/w
Concept and realization: Kaya Behkalam & Azin Feizabadi
Director of photography: Osama Rashid
Actors: Jeff Burell, Laila Gray, Stephen Patrick Hannah, Hening Kober, Julia Kratz, Erol Shaker
Narrator: Niel Wach
Production assistance: Wolfram Hahn, Paul Hosfeld, Magdalena Kallenberger & Johanna von Websky (HKW)
Music: “Departure” by Mohammad Reza Mortazavi
Produced by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

The Negotiation examines scenarios of political conflict through a staged negotiation in a UN Security Council-like set. The script presents a group of actors with a three-act drama on an unspecified revolutionary situation. They proceed to rehearse and embody both their real and scripted characters — the boundaries between fictional and factual histories, individual and collective desires, projections and biographical backgrounds become more and more blurred in the process. Prompted by the authority of a narrator, the actors discuss, improvise and negotiate the necessity for action. But to what extent can action be thought and performed beyond the inherited dramaturgical patterns?