Bitef

With the support of Theatre de Vanves, Le Relais - Centre de recherche theatrale, Theatre Paul Eluard de Choisy-le-Roi and the Muzej Istorije Jugoslavije / Museum of Yugoslav History. With the help of L'lnstitut Frangais, Centre national du theatre, DRAC Ile-deFrance - Ministere de la culture et de la communication, DICReAM - Centre national de la cinematographie and Arcadi.

11 It was as I was working on Belgrade that I learned from my mother that I had been there several times as a small child. I have no memory of that but I feel curiously close to that city and its inhabitants. I've grown up with this war. 1 remember the hunger strike during the Avignon Festival, Olivier Py's Requiem for Srebrenica and images of Godot by Susan Sonntag in the disembowelled library in Sarajevo. I am familiar with the sense of frustration and bafflement about which Angelica Liddell writes in Belgrade. I did not know her work but I saw myself immediately in the project of this piece. Moreover, the war was the reason of many conflicts in the family: at some point there circulated the idea that my grandfather would have supported the Serb nationalists and that they would have named a street in their capital after him. I do not believe much in this hypothesis and my search for the Josef-Fišerova Street in Belgrade was in vain. The play often returns to this incomprehensible aspect of ourselves which can push us to commit acts of absolute cruelty which nobody could predict. I think often of what a doctor in a Sarajevo hospital said in the film The living and the dead: “This is a cruel war, incomprehensible, inexplicable behaviour. Nobody will be able to explain how a human being can aim artillery fire at the maternity ward in a hospital, or people queuing to buy bread. What happens to a man to change so much, to be capable of this?” Julien Fišera

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HARD TO BE