Gabriel Abrantes’s film was made in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010. Taking the form of a magical-realist travelogue with elements of slapstick comedy, it follows a director who attempts to stage a faithful production of Aristophanes’s The Birds with locals.

The director imagines that the play might read as a story of colonial revolt. In the glaring sun of a village square, actors recite the ancient Greek comedy in the original while wearing carnival costumes made of papier-mâché, which in Haiti often satirize political figures.

The locals, however, do not accept the director’s premise. Instead, they tell and enact magical and tragic stories that might represent the economic malaise of a depressing postcolonial reality. Only, these supposedly authentic stories are in fact adaptations from The Arabian Nights, an originally anonymous collection of oral tales later reformulated for 18th-century European audiences.

Abrantes thus offers a comic comment on the preconceptions that artists bring along on their visits to places they do not know well enough, and whose context is more complex than they can understand.

Link

https://2022.steirischerherbst.at/en/program/artists/3641/gabriel-abrantes