Teatro de guerra / Theatre of War

Producers: Gema Juarez-Allen, Gema Films, Alejandra Grinschpun, Bettina Walter, BWP, Ingmar Trost, Sutor Kolonko, Pedro Saleh, Sake Argentina

The Falklands War lasted from April to June of 1982 and took the lives of 655 Argentinian and 255 British soldiers. When Argentina occupied the islands, Britain sent troops to the 12,000-kilometer Overseas Territory. The war lasted two months, the conflict is still smoldering today.

Thirty-five years after the end of the war, Argentinian artist and director Lola Arias invites veterans to look back – together, either in pairs or in dialogue with the camera. The British and the Argentinians face each other as former enemies, but also form an ensemble, such as when they re-enact a battle scene in an abandoned building that resembles a theatre. Maps, faded magazines, and footage of the surreal sites where combat took place provide visual points of departure and cinematic spaces for their stories of fear – fear of both dying and of killing – and of the repercussions of a war that left its mark on all of them. But Teatro de guerra doesn’t just confine itself to the past: in staged encounters with young actors the film also asks how memories are transmitted, and how they live on.

A theatre and film project about delusion and manipulation, about dread and fear, about survival and the force of having to live, the forgiving power of shared remembrance and the deranging question: What would we send our children into war for?

Festival: War or Peace - Crossroads of History 1918 / 2018

Film stills: Lola Arias