A selection of Cinema Tropical’s Shortlist of 2018 as one of the Best Latin American Films of the Year and winner of the Best Director Award at the Buenos Aires International Film Festival (BAFICI), Lola Arias’ debut documentary feature Theatre of War / Teatro de guerra is a delirious essay on how to represent war, performed by former enemies.
In 1982, Argentina and UK fought the Malvinas Falklands War. The war ended with the British military victory and took about 1.000 lives, both British and Argentinean. While the conflict took place years ago, the sovereignty of the islands is still in dispute.
Theatre of War, which had its New York premiere at The Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight, tells the story of how six veterans from the Malvinas/ Falklands War came together to make a film. Almost thirty-five years after the conflict, three British and three Argentine veterans spent months together discussing their war memories and then rehearsing their re-enactment.
This film is a way of showing the whole social experiment of making an artistic project with one-time enemies of war: the auditions to find the protagonists, the first meetings and discussions with them, the theatrical re-enactments of their memories in different scenarios: a swimming pool, a construction site, a military regiment.
Theatre of War playfully switches between reality and fiction, spontaneity and acting. It explores how to transform a soldier into an actor, how to turn war experiences into a story, how to show the collateral effects of war. The movie brings together former enemies to perform their wartime and post-war nightmares.
THEATRE OF WAR / TEATRO DE GUERRA
A film by Lola Arias
(Argentina/Spain, 2018, 82 min. In English and Spanish with English subtitles)
