Sibiu: Theater festival in the shadow of war and violence

As every year, in 2025 the Romanian city of Sibiu transformed into a giant stage for art and theater for ten days in July. This now long-established theater festival offered not only top-class theater, music, and dance performances, but also exhibitions, readings, film screenings, conferences, and panel discussions. This fostered a lively exchange between the artists, between artists and audiences, and among the spectators.

This year, both the presentations and discussions also addressed the current global situation, conflicts, and political extremism. The war in neighboring Ukraine is not far away. And Romania experienced political extremism itself during the recent presidential election campaign .

From Iraq to Transylvania

The new play "The Seer" by Swiss director Milo Rau , a production at the Berlin Schaubühne, was particularly dedicated to the topic of war and violence. It tells the story of a highly successful war photographer, brilliantly played by Ursina Lardi. The photographer repeatedly seeks out new theaters of war and places of horror to satisfy her own thirst for sensationalism and, above all, that of her audience, and to earn money from her photographs. The play also tells the story of an Iraqi teacher whose hand was chopped off as punishment by the IS regime. "The Seer" is inspired by Sophocles' character Philoctetes, who loses everything due to an injury and is banished from society.

Portrait of a bearded man — The Swiss theater maker and director Milo Rau Image: Barbara Gindl/APA/picturedesk.com/picture alliance

Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, co-founders of the renowned theater group Rimini Protokoll , also came to Sibiu with "Futur4." The play, which premiered at the Wiesbaden State Theater, was created as a co-production with several theaters and cultural institutions, including the Sibiu Theater Festival and the Goethe Institute Bucharest. It deals with the history of the Transylvanian Saxons, a German minority who lived in Romania for more than 800 years and shaped the face of the Transylvania region. Under the Ceausescu regime and after its fall, almost all Transylvanian Saxons emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany.

A play with bot and AI

Teenager Ursula Gärtner in Kronstadt (Brasov) in Transylvania also dreams of being "bought free" by the German state , of a colorful, perfect world in the Federal Republic of Germany, just like the "beautiful" women and men in the fashion catalogs that friends and relatives bring back with them when they visit their old homeland.

The story of this German minority in Romania is told backwards, but simultaneously forwards – partly with the help of artificial intelligence. What remains of this turbulent period spanning eight centuries? How is it carried on and lived by future generations?

Ursula Gärtner's son is the product of her marriage to a native Congolese, and her recently born granddaughter has a Kurdish mother. Will this grandchild be able to communicate with her grandmother later, when she's no longer around, using artificial intelligence ?

A man in a dark shirt and a sky blue cardigan gestures while speaking — Joachim Umlauf, Director of the Goethe-Institut in Bucharest. Photo: Medana Weident/DW

Computational linguist Xenia Klinge is responsible for this experiment. The Ursula-Bot she created becomes an "equal, highly improvising protagonist" in the play, Helgard Haug told DW. "AI is fully present in our everyday lives—everywhere and more powerfully everywhere. We tried to explore this a bit with the play. How does AI operate, and where do we need to distance ourselves from it? Every performance is different because the bot is involved."

Joachim Umlauf, director of the Goethe-Institut Bucharest , is enthusiastic about the implementation: "This history of Europe is being told differently, with the help of AI and its tools. This makes it fresh, full of questions, and offers completely new insights."

Current topics on stage

"Reflections on East-West Perspectives," a performative installation also on view during the festival, explores similar themes: What kind of memory do we maintain today in connection with this recent past, and how does this influence our ability to recognize contemporary forms of extremism and information manipulation? Curator Roxana Lapadat conducted interviews and studied numerous documents in German and Romanian archives, including those of the former Securitate.

Six men stand on a stage, holding hands as they look at the applauding audience. The man on the right edge of the picture is wearing a long pink skirt and is bare-chested, the four men next to him are wearing black trousers and white polo shirts, and the man on the left edge of the picture is wearing a black suit. — Scene from the play "Who killed my father" by Edouard Louis. Photo: Medana Weident, DW

The staging of the autobiographical essay "Who Killed My Father?" by bestselling French author Édouard Louis, a production by the Metropolis Theatre in Bucharest, also took a political turn. Like many of his texts, it dealt with devastating labor policies, violence, homosexuality, and social injustice.

Lorca's "Blood Wedding," staged by Hunor Horvath at the German section of the Sibiu National Theater, was set not in Spain this time but in multi-ethnic Transylvania. With a wealth of acting and vitality, dance, and music, the production brought this tragedy of love, revenge, jealousy, and death closer to the Sibiu audience.

Transatlantic relations

Hollywood's great acting legends were also present in 2025: Kathleen Turner performed a play by Gertrude Stein , describing encounters with great artists during her stay in Paris. Bill Murray, together with German star cellist Jan Vogler, brought the project "New Worlds" to Sibiu.

A man in a colorful shirt with a straw hat on his head speaks into a microphone — The American actor Bill Murray in Sibiu Photo: Medana Weident/DW

It focuses on important writers and composers such as Ernest Hemingway , Walt Whitman , Leonard Bernstein , and George Gershwin , whose works have profoundly influenced American culture, and, not least, on the bridges these artists built between America and Europe. It thus also points to the state of transatlantic relations and ties in with current debates about world domination and authoritarianism.