By: Nazila Fathi
May 14, 2020–
Hamid Rahmanian’s Feathers of Fire sparked a connection when it played in some of the largest theaters around the world. The award-winning show, a story based on the Shahnameh, performed live for three years.
By releasing Feathers of Fire: A Persian Epic movie on streaming service Vimeo this month, Rahmanian, the creator of the show, wants to introduce an uplifting Persian story to a larger audience.
“I want to show Iran’s culture in a positive light,” Rahmanian, an award-winning artist, told me from his Brooklyn home.
“And I want people to take a break for 70 minutes.”
“We all need hope during these dark times,” he added.
The visually breathtaking show is adapted from the 11th-century Persian epic book of the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, by Abolqasem Ferdowsi. It is among its very few stories that have a happy ending.
Feathers of Fire: An Excellent Movie in Coronavirus Lockdown
Feathers of Fire begins with birth and ends with birth. There are no deaths in the story.
I found Feathers of Fire, not just uplifting, but also relevant and inspiring. It is a story of leadership, tenacity, and the power of people to unite against adversity. The characters are puppets, but the audience sees only their shadows, which makes the show almost magical. The light and the soundtrack create a breath-taking ambiance.
NYC Theatre Review called it “magnificent” because all of the magic occurs live right before your very eyes.
“What the Walt Disney Company does for hundreds of millions of dollars in a single animated film that takes five years or more to create, the Feathers of Fire ensemble and the creative team does in eighty minutes using a centuries-old art form, elaborately designed shadow puppets, modern multimedia techniques, and a diverse company of extremely skilled and gifted actors,” it wrote.
Moral Lessons
The Shahnameh came out in 1010. Ten centuries later, some of those challenges still ring true.
Feathers of Fire tells the story of star-crossed lovers, Zaul and Rudabeh, who triumph against all odds.
Their secret? Wisdom and diplomacy rather than war, a much-needed policy in the world today.
Unlike other characters of the Shahnameh, whose lives perish by revenge or wrath, Zaul, a Persian knight, wins.
The story begins with Saum, a Persian knight, leaving his Albino infant, Zaul, in the forest to die. A mythical bird finds and raises the child. He enters into forbidden love with the princess Rudabeh after Saum repents and brings Zaul back to court. The king dispatches a large army to raze Rudabeh’s city to the ground to prevent the marriage. But, a wise and diplomatic Zaul persuades the king that his marriage to Rudabeh poses no threat.
Eventually, Zaul prevails and prevents a devastating battle. Their union gives birth to Rostam, the Hercules of Iran, and one of the main characters of the Shahnameh.
I admire and share Rahmanian’s passion for telling Persian stories to a cross-cultural audience. Through my books, My Name is Cyrus and Avicenna, The Father of Modern Medicine, I aim to create a connection, too, and introduce kids to global stories.
International stories are crucial in changing our perspectives about other cultures and recognizing how similar we are.
The Shahnameh, A Timeless Book
Iranians regard the Shahnameh as a literary masterpiece.
The book reflects Iran’s history, cultural values, its ancient religion of Zoroastrianism, and its profound sense of nationhood.
Ferdowsi completed the Shahnameh at a time when national independence had been compromised after the fall of the Persian Empire. The book begins with the creation of the world and the origin myths of the arts of civilization and ends with the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century. A mix of myth and history, the characters take the readers on heroic adventures filled with superhuman champions, magical creatures, heart-wrenching love stories, and centuries-long battles.
Although the book is the embodiment of the pre-Islamic Persian soul, it offers much more than a national treasure. Ferdowsi labored thirty years to create the world’s longest epic poems. As a document of human collective consciousness, it reflects the dilemmas of the human condition as it confronts us with the timeless questions of our existence.
Rahmanian’s Engaging Narrative
Rahmanian is not a novice to the Shahnameh.
He has spent the past 12 years working on the book. His first work on the Shahnameh was a modernized translation of some of the stories with miniature illustrations. The translator, Ahmad Sadri, a professor of Sociology and Anthropology, produced masterful prose in English, making the stories understandable even to native Persian speakers like me, who find the old Persian poetry difficult to read. The book is called Shahnameh, The Epic of the Persian Kings. It took Rahmanian, who is a graphic designer by training, four years to complete the 600 illustrated pages of the book (audiobook is also available).
In Zahhak: The Legend of the Serpent King, another puppet show, he told the story of a mythical character, the misguided Prince Zahhak, who is easily swayed by the devil to overthrow his crowned father. The Devil empowers King Zahhak by giving him monstrous snakes that grow out of the king’s shoulders.
After the puppet show, Rahmanian made the pop-up book, Zahak: The Legend of the Serpent King. It won the 2018 Meggendorfer prize. With the book, Rahmanian told me, he wanted “to delight the imaginations of readers all over the world from ages 2 to 102.”
In Pursuit of Perfection
It took two years to create Feathers of Fire, to make the puppets and rehearse until the performance was flawless. The show employs eight actors, 160 puppets and 15 masks and costumes. Its 134 animated backgrounds are rear-projected onto a vast, 15- by 30-foot screen.
“Backstage must work like a Swiss-made watch, every detail has to perform and execute perfectly, otherwise the show would not look correctly,” Rahmanian told me.
Rahmanian’s next project, Song of the North, is another shadow puppet production. It is the story of Persia’s Princess Manijeh, a hero who rescues her beloved from a perilous predicament of her own making.
The release date of Feathers of Fire this month is not accidental: on May 15, Iranians celebrate to commemorate Ferdowsi.
However, the biggest prize, Rahmanian told me, was that he had shared Iran’s rich visual and literary culture with a global audience. The show had 112 performances around the world. It sold out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and CLA’s Freud Playhouse among many other theaters.
Francis Ford Coppola, the famed filmmaker, saw it no less than three times.
He called it “spectacular cinematic wizardry.”
Rent Feathers of Fire here.
