Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács commissioned Iranian opera singer Shahram Yazdani to create a Persian version of “Nature Boy” for their film “Forest on Location”, set in the digital reconstruction of the primeval Bialowieza forest. The song itself has a migratory history: Herman Yablokoff, a Russian immigrant from Bialowieza, first composed Shvayg Main Harts for the Yiddish theater in New York, a lament on migration and alienation. Its melody was later appropriated by Eden Ahbez, who passed it to Nat King Cole as “Nature Boy”.
Performed in Loods 6—once the shipping hall of the Royal Dutch Steamboat Company, a hub of trade routes spanning the Mediterranean, New York, the Indies, and South America—Yazdani’s Persian version resonates with the building’s layered history of global circulation.
Just as Loods 6 shifted from a colonial warehouse to a space for artists and new voices, the song migrated from Bialowieza through New York and Nat King Cole to Yazdani. In his performance, the wise tree speaks back to him, offering a new perspective on this history of movement and encounter, and on our relation to nature.
