Ana Rosa Mendes

A documentary essay about a text that penetrates lives and lives that penetrate a text. In September 2015 teatro GRIOT - a theatre company based in Lisbon, whose actors are mostly Afro-descendants - started to rehearse Shakespeare's "The Tempest" with acclaimed director Bruno Bravo in a little coastal village. Starting with the first rehearsals the film explores Shakespeare's text and the actors' biographies, between the play and the landscape and brings up topics such as memories, home, emigration and colonialism. A complex mosaic of multiple voices.

We stare at mirrors as if 'image' was a weapon of self-defense. At night, I hide in actors' dressing rooms for a working class experience. By day, I face an old theatre being razed to the ground, making way for a parking lot. Graffitis have curtains, the nose cap of an umbrella arises from a mount of sand. Oh, Happy Days! No need to stage anything! The bulldozer is a dinosaur whose teeth and gracious neck swings by a EU flag. In the boxes, we await the audience. Sometimes, nobody comes. Lost in a symbolic show of reality, I can only watch the world's end because all the endangered species perform and a reflecting labyrinth of life stories breaks through the glass of the Economic Eating Machine. Even when the sky is falling, theatre will always happen. So, choose the right place.