ARCHIVES 2016 / Sadnesses

Just as she's about to be named Prime Minister, Martha Heiger, the leader of the Popular Awakening Party, has to return to her native island, Tristesses, to bury her mother, found dead in puzzling circumstances. She finds her village ruined after the collapse of the Muspelheim abattoirs, and decides to use the situation to lay the foundations of a propaganda project. Meanwhile, far from the limelight, two teenage girls decide to take up arms... Inspired by the violent rise of various brands of nationalism in Europe, Anne-Cécile Vandalem's latest creation dissects with humour what she sees as one of the most formidable “weapons” of modern politics, the “saddening of peoples.” How? By inextricably weaving together sadness and social comedy, politics and moral investigations, emotion and her own acts of resistance. Turning this fable into a Nordic thriller, animist and supernatural, the director brings together fiction and reality, the theatre and the cinema, the living and the dead. A thriller in which the past and the present collide, in which characters are caught in situations at once funny and cruel, in which the insidious power of the media reigns supreme. “One of the states of sadness.”

Anne-Cécile Vandalem
After graduating from drama school, Anne-Cécile Vandalem began her career as an actress in various productions. From 2003 to 2007, she wrote and directed Zaï Zaï Zaï Zaï and Hansel and Gretel (with actor Jean-Benoît Ugeux). It was then that the young director, who lives and works in Brussels, laid the foundations of her research: fiction as a way to help people come out of their isolation, both literally and figuratively. Isolation is indeed a concept she likes to play with, redefining it thanks to technical scenic worlds that play with space and always add something of the supernatural to it, often inspired by cinema. From 2009 to 2014, heading her own projects within Das Fräuslein (Kompanie), she created her Trilogy of Parentheses: (Self) Service, Habit(u)ation, and After the Walls (UTOPIA), as well as the play Michel Dupont. Since then, Anne-Cécile Vandalem has carried out more of her aesthetic, physical, visual, and textual investigations that play with reality: What can I do for you?, Looking for Dystopia, and Still too sad to tell you.