ARCHIVES 2018 / PALE BLUE DOT

Julian Assange, Bradley—now Chelsea—Manning, Adrian Lamo, Hillary Clinton, David Leigh, a passerby, Wikileaks, the United States, Iraq, a ghost... Famous and unknown people, politicians and whistleblowers, and dominoes falling one after another are at the heart of Étienne Gaudillère's first direction, inspired by the 2010 Cablegate affair and its treatment by the media. From the Iraqi desert, a young American soldier leaked United States diplomatic cables. Via its founder Julian Assange, Wikileaks revealed their existence to the world. And then things got complicated... Thanks to its inventive montage, halfway between surveillance and freedom of speech, Pale Blue Dot plays with multiple forms of expression—MSN conversations, media interviews, eyewitness accounts, even monologues in verse—and questions in a most lively way the blurring of engagements and boundaries. With characters such as the lone wolf Bradley “Chelsea” Manning and the troubling Julian Assange, wars are no longer fought on the battlefield but in the media, and a new world appears: ours.

Étienne Gaudillère
In 2015, Étienne Gaudillère founded Compagnie Y, with which he created Pale Blue Dot in 2016. Out of that first show, he then created Conversation privée (Private Conversation), which zooms in on part of the story to question the idea of betrayal. As an actor, he recently appeared in Merlin ou la terre dévastée (Merlin, or, the Ruined Land) and Neuf Petites Filles (Nine Little Girls). His company, named after the generation born between 1980 and 1999, is driven by an irrepressible need to tackle History head-on. In 2018, he will direct Cannes 39-90, a show exploring the history of the Cannes Film Festival.