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Iranian actress and director Zar Amir (Holy Spider, Tatami) is set to play Lady Macbeth in Lili, a new interactive video game being produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in collaboration with New York indie video game studio iNK Stories. Amir’s Paris-based Alambic Production will co-produce. Lili marks the RSC’s video game debut.
The interactive take on Shakespeare’s iconic play will see Zar Amir play Lady Macbeth, aka Lili. The game is set in a stylized, neo-noir version of modern Iran, where everyone is under surveillance and the authoritarian state reaches into daily life. The gameplay will mix live-action cinema with an interactive format, giving players the chance to make the choices that will shake Lili’s destiny. Macbeth’s witches are reimagined as hackers and surveillance cameras and cyber-infiltration tools will allow players to immerse themselves in the game world.
“Lili takes up Shakespeare’s character-based exploration of political ambition, personal compromise, and distorted human lives under tyranny, and transports these themes to contemporary Iran,” said Emma Smith, an RSC Board member and leading Shakespeare academic who worked on the adaptation of the text for the game, calling it “both utterly Shakespearean, and radically defamiliarized. Forget the old chestnut that Shakespeare would be writing for Hollywood if he were alive now: what Lili makes absolutely clear is – he’d be writing for gaming.”
“As a storytelling medium, gaming today is what theatre has always been; a chance to explore worlds, inhabit stories, and experience something at once personal and communal,” added RSC co-artistic directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey. “Lili creates similar effects for audiences. Centering this tense thriller around Lady Macbeth rather than her husband is radical and transformative. It turns the play’s questions around gender, identity and power inside out.”
Zar Amir won the best actress prize in Cannes in 2022 for Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider and stepped behind the camera for the sport thriller Tatami in 2023, co-directing with Israeli filmmaker Guy Nattiv.
iNK Studios is best known for its award-winning game 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, an interactive adventure in which the player controls an aspiring photojournalist, who returns to Iran amidst the Iranian Revolution. Released in 2016, the game won multiple awards, was showcased at the Sundance and SXSW film festivals.
Lili is currently in development and slated for release later this year across multiple gaming platforms.
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