Saturday, February 20, 2021, 18:30 EET (GMT +02:00)
Malawi
Director: Fumban Innot Phiri / Malawi
Actor: Claudiu Bleonț
Episode: Day 6, Story 4
about the Director
Fumban Innot Phiri
Fumban Innot Phiri is Multi-Award winning playwright and director for National Theatre Makers Awards. He is a young dramatist, journalist, and theatre educator who has produced dramas and workshops for broadcast, stage, community, radio, film, and schools. His motivation is to help install the creative industry in Malawi as tool for development. He is currently working as theatre producer, actor, director and writer at YDC Theatre.
Off stage, Fumban Innot Phiri has worked widely in theatre super vision for community drama, forum theatre, and theatre for development on social political issues, his also Festival Coordinator for National Schools Youth Arts Festival (NASFEST).
On the stage, Fumban Innot Phiri has worked as actor, playwright, producer, and director; he has performed about 10 majors’ plays and writes approximately 20 productions, he also has experience in Radio-Plays in drama series for community young audience; Moyo ndi Mpamba and Zimachitika for Story workshop Education Trust.
As a mid-career artist, Fumban Innot Phiri has been widely involved in several international projects from theatre collaborations to festival participations in Germany, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Belgium, USA, Sweden, Rwanda and Zambia.
about the actor
Claudiu Bleonț
Claudiu Bleonț is an actor-show himself, a fascinating story creator, he is unpredictable, spontaneous, profound, explosive and subtle. A special blend of emotion, spirituality, playful force, sensitivity, eccentricity, and warm simplicity of the naturalness, he is one of the most important theatre and film actors of Romania.
In 1983, he graduated from the ”I.L. Caragiale” Institute of Theatre and Film (I.A.T.C.) Bucharest, class Prof. Grigore Gonţa and has collaborated over time with prestigious theatres from all over the country: Bulandra Theatre, Odeon Theatre, Comedy Theatre, Nottara Theatre, Youth Theatre in Piatra-Neamț and the Bucharest National Theatre, whose employee he was for 20 years. Since 2012, he has been an actor at the „Marin Sorescu” National Theatre in Craiova.
He is an artist of the extremes that attract and amplify each other in his roles. Bleonț had the chance to work with legendary directors who ”reset” him, such as Liviu Ciulei – Spring Awakening, Bulandra Theatre; Vlad Mugur – L’Affaire de la rue de Lourcine, Youth Theatre, Piatra-Neamț; Andrei Șerban – The Ancient Trilogy, The Cherry Orchard, Our Country’s Good, Bucharest NT; Cătălina Buzoianu – Ivory Tower, Comedy Theatre; Horea Popescu – Caligula, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Bucharest NT) or Robert Wilson – Rhinoceros, Craiova National Theatre.
He was twice nominated for the UNITER Prizes, for Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, directed by Beatrice Rancea, and Ion Nebunul in Năpasta by I.L. Caragiale, directed by Radu Dinulescu, both productions staged at the Bucharest National Theatre.
With an extraordinary career in cinema (almost 30 roles, in Romanian and international films), Claudiu Bleonț made a remarkable debut, in the leading roles in the director Dan Pița’s Contest (1984) and Paso doble (1986), for which he was awarded the Prize for Best Actor at the Festival in Costinești.
The Romanian-French co-production An Unforgettable Summer, directed by Lucian Pintilie, where he excellently played Capt. Petre Dumitriu alongside Kristin Scott Thomas, was presented in the official selection at Cannes, in 1994.
In the current season, he can be seen at the Craiova National Theatre, in the very courageous directorial proposals of young directors such as Bobi Pricop (Claudiu Bleonț is Tim, in the intense experimental performance The Author by Tim Crouch) or Dragoș Alexandru Mușoiu (Dr. Givings in In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) by Sarah Ruhl; Radu in The Break-in after Răzvan Petrescu) as well as in the impressive productions of Ajax. An Essay on Dementia after Sophocles, directed by Mihai Măniuțiu (role: Generalissimo Ajax); Athens by Night after W. Shakespeare, directed by Charles Chemin (roles: Timon; Quince).
