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IT WAS OUR LAND
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Open in the appThe Montaigne estate, somewhere in northern Algeria. 653 hectares transformed into a farm where eucalyptus, vines, oats and wheat grow. This land has always been ruled by the Saint-André family – or rather, since they settled there in the mid-19th century, like so many other… The Montaigne estate, somewhere in northern Algeria. 653 hectares transformed into a farm where eucalyptus, vines, oats and wheat grow. This land has always been ruled by the Saint-André family – or rather, since they settled there in the mid-19th century, like so many other families carrying out France's project of a settlement colony in Algeria. In a choral narrative, the voices of six members of this family intertwine to tell, each in their own way, the moment of collapse of their world – the Algerian war of independence. Bringing together five actors on a stage inhabited by paintings by Kabyle artist Kamel Khélif, Célie Pauthe gives voice to this chorus of characters who, through their violent contradictions, expose all the madness of the colonial system – French, but not only – its self-destructive rage, its sickly nostalgia. The director brings to the stage, for the first time, the burning, baroque and relentless language of novelist Mathieu Belezi, by adapting the first of four novels he devoted to French colonization of Algeria. With this narrative that weaves the voices of the dead with those of the living, Célie Pauthe invites us to "look History in the eye", as German dramaturg Heiner Müller said – and to reopen a history, that of colonization, which has not finished its course, nor stopped spreading its harmful logic into our present.