(in german and greek with surtitles)

NEW CAST MEMBER

Tonight it is not thirty thousand Greeks battling thirty thousand Germans and Bulgarians but sixty thousand soft human bodies fighting countless machines of steel.

– Life in the Tomb by Stratis Myrivilis

A war that is different from any war before. Neither the human mind nor the human body was prepared for this machinery of war. A thousand killed every day and countless injuries of the survivors. Soldiers reaching their psychological limits and often pigeonholed as “hysteric malingerers” as a result of being traumatized.

Two men. Two languages. A small room. Paranoia pushes its way to the fore, targeting the individual soldier and hitting whole societies. Who is the person over there? Your brother? Your enemy? Is he real? What’s out there?

Director Kostis Kallivretakis journeys back in time, not in order to find ready answers but in order to create the right space for his questions: How can we understand a shocked society? People whose lives have been turned upside down. People who don’t know whether they should fear or hope, fight or surrender? Existence between crisis, war und coma.

Kostis Kallivretakis goes back a whole century, back to Europe’s first generation, Europe’s shocked generation. His production that was nominated for the Monika Bleibtreu Award is a darkroom. Inside, sometimes vaguely discernible, sometimes razor-sharp and vivid, an idea, a visual memory of what was called shell shock at the time of World War I and is now termed Posttraumatic stress disorder emerges: breakdown and self-disintegration in the face of the modern machinery of war.

Director: Kostis Kallivretakis

Music: Stavros Gasparatos

Stage design: Cecile Marcand

Dramaturgy: Iury Trojaborg

Featuring: Michail Fotopoulos, Thomas Gerber