Director Lin Zhaohua (second from left) and Polish director Krystian Lupa at a media event in Beijing.[Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

This year's Lin Zhaohua Theater Arts Festival will open with Russian director Lev Dodin's epic play, Brothers and Sisters. Chen Nan reports.

The annual Lin Zhaohua Theater Arts Festival is an important cultural event in China that brings well-known foreign plays to audiences here.

Initiated by established theater director Lin Zhaohua in 2010, the festival will run from March through September, with 16 productions to be staged in Beijing,Tianjin and Harbin this year. Artists from Russia, Poland, Germany, France, Italy and China are expected to participate.

"Human beings and individual fates" is the theme of this year's festival.

"We want the festival to speak to the reality that we're living in. By presenting great theatrical productions, audiences can be inspired to reflect on their own lives," says festival curator Qian Cheng, who is also the director of the Tianjin Grand Theater.

The festival will open with Russian director Lev Dodin's epic play, Brothers and Sisters, at the Tianjin Grand Theater on March 4. The eight-hour play, which premiered in 1985 at Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg, has toured 14 countries in past decades.

Adapted from several novels by Russian author Fyodor Abramov, the play is about people's daily lives on a farm after World War II.