Die Revolution frisst ihre Kinder!
The Revolution Devours Its Children
A bit of “reverse colonialism” is on the mind of a theatre group from Graz, Austria when they embark on an adventure in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. They want to stage “Danton’s Tod” by Georg Büchner with puppets in the sub-Saharan state. It doesn’t take long for director Julia (Julia Gräfner) to realize: “This has nothing to do with the life of the people here.” Creating a new puppet of Thomas Sankara, the legendary founding figure of the free Burkina Faso, seems like a solution. But it is also risky, since people are protesting against the regime of Blaise Compaoré, the strongman in charge in the country. Everybody believes it was him who had Sankara killed in 1987. It takes about 15 minutes for Jan-Christopher Gockel to give the first strong hint that DIE REVOLUTION FRISST IHRE KINDER is no straight, making-of-art-in-a-foreign-world-documentary, but rather something closer to a MAN BITES DOG for the surreal world of provincial theater. The weirdness peaks when Julia frantically claims that her vision of art has advanced the local democracy movement: “We made the revolution here.” Jan-Christopher Gockels embedded theater-film delivers the meta-meta-irony to that preposterousness. (Bert Rebhandl)
In the presence of Jan-Christoph Gockel and Eike Zuleeg (camera).
Jan-Christoph Gockel: DIE REVOLUTION FRISST IHRE KINDER (2020)
- Raphael Muff
- Serge Bambara
- Laurenz Leky
- Evamaria Salcher
- Étienne Minoungou
- Michael Pietsch
- Komi Mizrajim Togbonou
- Julia Gräfner
- Eike Zuleeg
- Sanfo Halassane
- Eike Zuleeg
- Smockey
- Komi Mizrajim Togbonou
- Matthias Grübel
- Julia Kurzweg
- Julia Kurzweg
- Zénabou Zoungrana
- Jennifer Weiss
- Jennifer Weiss
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