“Telling a Story Together Creates Another Story”: Milo Rau on the Utopian Documentarism in His ‘Antigone in the Amazon’

I first encountered the work of Milo Rau back in 2020, when his reimagining of the story of Jesus, The New Gospel, premiered in Venice. Set in the Italian town of Matera, where both Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ were likewise shot, the project was an on-the-ground collaboration with local residents, specifically African migrants locked in a real-life battle for human rights. Blurring fact and fiction, the film notably featured Enrique Irazoqui (Pasolini’s Jesus) and Maia Morgenstern (Gibson’s Mother Mary) alongside newcomer Yvan Sagnet, a Cameroon-born political activist and labor organizer who went from taking on the mafia in an agricultural workers strike to taking on the role of Jesus. And now the artist’s latest example of “utopian documentarism,” Antigone in the Amazon, has arrived on these shores, having recently played NYC’s Skirball Cultural Center. The multimedia piece combines theater and film, and stars professionals onstage (two Europeans and two Brazilians), along with members of the MST (Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement) onscreen. It also manages to deftly weave together the story of Antigone—played by the Indigenous activist Kay Sara—with an infamous 1996 massacre on Native land. It includes a harrowing recreation at the site of the military dictatorship’s crime by a “Greek chorus” comprised of several survivors and their descendants. But perhaps the most unexpected “act” of all is one of radical transparency, as the onstage participants recount the story of the process itself, narrating the making of the film as its images appear on the giant screen behind them. “The pavilion where we performed is actually a classroom” and “In Indigenous cosmology, the past is in front of you,” an actor explains, marveling at his faraway colleagues’ ability to seamlessly inhabit several worlds and times simultaneously. But there are also nods to Zoom calls during Covid, and the irony of Europeans traveling to the jungle in an anticapitalist, anti-colonialist creative pursuit. Mentions of “guilt complex disguised as activism” and “privileged self-doubt” likewise pepper monologues. As does a recollection from the Indigenous philosopher cast as the seer Tiresias, who once told a European journalist that he feared for the white people in this era of rampant environmental destruction as they had never experienced the Apocalypse. “I’m not afraid of the end of the world,” he states. “Our world died 500 years ago. And we’re still here.” To learn all about this physical and metaphysical journey, Documentary reached out to the busy Swiss director-writer-filmmaker (and lecturer, author, and TV critic), and founder of the International Institute of Political Murder, a theater and film production company. Rau’s also the former artistic leader at Belgium’s NTGent, and is currently the new curator of the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.