Arts & Culture

The Nancy World Theater Festival

By its nature, a theater festival is a display of the ephemeral. In essence, the theatrical act only leaves a trace on the memory. Hence a difficulty exists when trying to make a film about the Nancy World Theater Festival.
To begin with, we had to conduct thorough ´archeological´ research´ sifting through all the documents filmed during the Festival. Only then could we track down the main actors, and discuss with them their ever-consuming passion for the theater, in this unique event in the history of theater in the 20th century.
Right from its beginnings, the Festival took a political stance: it was fiercely anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and anti-bourgeois. Rather than use great speeches, or remind viewers of the significant political issues of the time via televisual archive footage, we chose to let the Nancy theater productions speak for themselves, as these say more than enough about how much Nancy, at the time the world´s theater capital, was also the capital of world theater, with its issues, its struggles, its dreams and its utopias…
It was in Nancy too, among the throng of thousands of actors, and hundreds of directors and troupes who came to display their theatrical work, that some of the most significant creators of the second half of the 20th century were ´discovered´: Jerzy Grotowski, Bob Wilson, Tadeusz Kantor, Shuji Terrayama, and Pina Bausch to name but a few. Of course, for our film we met and interviewed those who are still with us, though their words, heavy with nostalgia, often evoke only the first heroic few hours and talk of a lost youth. We opted to show the dazzlingly bright evidence of their work at the time.