Milo Rau

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What would Jesus preach in the 21st century? Who would his disciples be? And how would today's society respond to the return of the Son of God? With The New Gospel, Milo Rau is staging a "Revolt of Dignity". Led by political activist Yvan Sagnet, the movement is fighting for the rights of migrants who came to Europe across the Mediterranean to be enslaved on the tomato fields in southern Italy and to live in ghettos under inhumane conditions.

"An acting family plays the members of a family about to take their own lives in this heartbreaking celebration of the ordinary. (...) Performed at the stately pace of a slow piece of Bach, Familie is assured, soulful and unnerving." - The Guardian

In March 2013, a courtroom was set up to provide a stage for a show trial that pitted the different sides of the cultural war in Russia. Yet the people on stage were no professional thespians but real-life actors: artists, politicians, church leaders, real lawyers, a real judge and a real jury. Director Milo Rau achieved a unique and oppressive insight into Russia under Putins authoritarian reign.

The images of the condemnation and execution of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena on Christmas Day in 1989 are etched deeply in the collective unconscious of several generations of television viewers. Exactly 20 years after its occurrence, the famous show trial was re-enacted in a historically reproduced setting. The film interweaves the stage production with interviews conducted with eyewitnesses and archive material, and takes a look backstage in the Odeon Theatre in Bucharest.

The war in Congo has caused more than six million deaths over the last twenty years. The population is suffering, but the offenders stay with impunity. Many people see this conflict as one of globalisation's crucial econimic distribution battles because the country has major deposits of many high-tech raw materials. Milo Rau, one of Europe's most acclaimed theatre directors, succeeds in gathering victims, perpetrators, observes and analysts of the conflict for a unique civil tribunal in eastern Congo. The documentary film brings these spectacular court trials to life on the big screen and creates an unvarnished portrait of the largest and bloodiest economic wars in human history.

Through the story of Ihsane Jarfi’s murder, Milo Rau suggests there are shades of gray between the actual event and the staged event, and between murder and performing murder. This performance text was developed by Rau and his Ensemble of professional and amateur actors.

Milo Rau and the Schaubühne Ensemble look via Lenin’s brain to what is arguably the most momentous revolution in the history of humankind: in a society caught between awakening and apathy, revolutionary longing and reactionary opposition – a labyrinth of hope and fear, of political ideals and the collective experience of violence.