Antigone in the Amazon

The images of the burning Amazon from last summer caused quite a stir throughout the world. The attack by the Brazilian agribusiness on the world’s largest contiguous jungle, which was strongly supported by President Bolsonaro, not only threatens the planet’s “green lung”, but also puts the peoples living there and their traditions dating back thousands of years at risk. After the productions “Orestes in Mosul” in the former capital of the Islamic State and the Jesus film “The New Gospel” in the southern Italian refugee camps, Milo Rau and his team travel to the Amazon Basin in Brazil to conclude their “Trilogy of Ancient Myths”. In the federal state of Pará, the government has fuelled land conflicts for decades through large-scale mining projects, the construction of dams and the state promotion of monoculture soy farming. In a new project which will take place on an occupied piece of land in cooperation with indigenous people, activists and actors from Europe and Brazil, the tragedy of “Antigone” will be retold: as a bloody encounter between traditional wisdom and global turbo-capitalism, as an epos of the struggle of mankind against its self-inflicted decline into greed, delusion and hubris.