Hans Platzgumer

In the five years before her death, Nawal doesn’t speak a single word. At the reading of her will, her children, the twins Jeanne and Simon, receive two sealed letters. One is addressed to an older brother they’d known nothing about; the other is for their father, who they’d been told was dead. The twins’ search for their family takes them to Nawal’s homeland in the Middle East. Here, they discover who their mother really was, unveiling the secret she’d carried around with her for years, and how inextricably the family is enmeshed in a past marked by civil war. The play, written in 2003 by Wajdi Mouawad, was adapted for the screen by Denis Villeneuve in 2010: the film, Incendies, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.Writer and composer Hans Platzgumer was born in Innsbruck, where he studied classical guitar at the Tyrolean State Conservatory. He went on to receive a diploma in electroacoustics from the International Academy of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. From 1989, he lived and worked for several years in New York and Los Angeles, where he also studied film music, before going on to London, Hamburg and Munich. He has released numerous albums with international labels – both solo and produced in collaboration with various bands – and has toured worldwide. Platzgumer is renowned for his work as a composer for theatre, film and audio dramas, and has produced over 70 soundtracks for institutions including the National Theatre Mannheim, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, the Residenztheater Munich, Munich Kammerspiele, the Neuköllner Opera House and Bregenz Festival. Platzgumer has written since the early 2000s: his latest novel, Drei Sekunden Jetzt (“Three seconds now”), was published by the publishing house Zsolnay/Hanser Verlag.