Yotam Gotal lives in Tel Aviv as a director, actor and author. He works as a dramaturge for the "Khan Theater" in Jerusalem. Brecht has long been a topic of interest for the Tel Aviv University graduate. But it was a lecture at the Ruhr Triennale in 2019 that sparked his interest. It was there that Gotal became aware of Brecht's "Fatzer". "It blew me away," he says, describing his incisive experience. The Goethe-Institut Tel-Aviv supported him in bringing "Fatzer" to the stage in Hebrew for the first time. Yotam Gotal is changing genre for the Augsburg Brecht Festival. His film project "The Desert a City" is inspired by Brecht's "Reader for City Dwellers". With actor Nitay Dagan, a film crew and two off-road vehicles, he set off in October 2021, out of the city and into the Negev Desert in southern Israel.
"In many ways, Brecht paved the way that I would like to follow as a director. When I first read the poems from the Reader for City Dwellers, questions came to my mind. The urban experience that Brecht describes, what does it have to do with my life in the city? What high demands do the poems place on today's readers? What is my Israeli perspective on these texts? I decided to go into the desert with the poems, perhaps because of an innate enjoyment of pranks. I wanted to find out what new access I could find there to these extremely urban poems. The multifaceted nature of Brecht's work has always inspired me. When you read Brecht's beautiful prose, you are always confronted with corrosive and socially charged structures that form the narrative framework. This inspires me to create provocative content myself." Yotam Gotal