“The journalist in front of me is asking me a few more questions: Why do you write? What’s real and what’s fiction? I don’t remember my answer, because at that moment I see him. And that is a picture that cannot exist, and yet I shout out his name – Thomas!”

A chance encounter in the train station brings the author Philippe Besson to confront fragments of painful memories from a secret love story between two teenage boys in a small and conservative town in France in the 1980s. It is a poetic and honest drama about life after abandonment, from the perspectives of three men who are connected to each other through tangled bonds of betrayal, regret, and perhaps love.

Tali Hecht is a lecturer on drama and theatre, a stage director, and a dramaturge. She has developed educational and professional pedagogy courses for teachers and holds a BA in directing and dramaturgy and an MA in theatre from Tel Aviv University, of which she is also a former faculty member. She served as a member of the artistic management of SmallBama Festival. She is the winner of the Excellence Scholarship on behalf of the Rector of Tel Aviv University, a recipient of the VERA Excellence Scholarship and the Schutlander Scholarship for Master’s Students. Her works include Disgrace (an adaptation of Taming of the Shrew, Tzavta); Salt (SmallBama), Trainspotting (Hama’abada), Romeo and Juliet (University Theatre), and Hebron Haggadah (Cameri Theatre). She is currently working on her first album as a singer-songwriter.

Nir Frankel is a graduate of Beit Zvi School of the Performing Arts. He holds a BEd in theatre directing from Kibbutzim College of Education, where he also studied visual literacy with a focus on theatre. Acting credits include The Crucifixion (Bat Yam International Festival); and Under the Shed (Jaffa Theatre). Directing credits: Blood Wedding and HiStoryHairStory, a performance about the politics of hair (Jaffa Theatre); Butterflies Are Free and The Lover (Kibbutzim College); and I am Shulamit (SmallBama Festival).