Milo Rau
Photo: Marc Driessen
Milo Rau
Born in Bern, Switzerland in 1977, Rau is a director, playwright, film director, journalist, and activist. He founded the International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM) in 2007. The institute conducts thorough research into actual horrific crimes, conflicts, and historic incidents, and recreates them through multimedia works using stage and film, exposing the social structure and political background, denouncing those involved and raising issues for the audience to consider. He has made over fifty works, including Five Easy Pieces (2016) in which a kidnapping and murder of a young girl in the 1990s in Belgium is reconstructed, touching on traumatic issues surrounding Belgium’s former colonization of the Congo, and exposing the secondary victimization inherent in theater. He became artistic director of Belgium’s NTGent in 2018 (until 2024) and staged a trilogy using the guidelines in his Ghent Manifesto, superimposing real-life issues and Greek tragedies. The first was Oreste in Mosul (2019) where The Oresteia by Aeschylus was performed by the people of Mosul, Iraq, which was occupied and destroyed by the extremist group IS. The second was Antigone in the Amazon (2023) which contrasted the situation in the Amazon of the nation cutting down the rainforest to grow soybeans and the resistance of the workers, with Antigone by Sophocles, Medea’s Children (2024) contrasts Euripides’ Medea with the 2007 murder of five children by their mother, recreated and spoken by children. He has also produced films in a similar vein, filming at the locations that the films are based on, including The Congo Tribunal (2015), and The New Gospel (2021). Rau became artistic director of Wiener Festwochen in July 2023. He continues to be an artist in residence at NTGent.（Updated October 2024）
