AEF2023: La obra (The Play)

It’s that time of the year again, when Athenians start planning their summer holidays around the programme of the Athens Epidaurus Festival. The leading performing arts festival in Greece, and one of the oldest in Europe, returns between June 1st and August 26th for its 68th edition with a rich programme of events. As always, the main venues are the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the industrial complex of Pireos 260 and the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus. Click here for our festival picks or head over to the official website for the full programme.

Simon Frank, a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor, relocates to an Argentine village and constructs a theatrical set. There, he starts to re-enact scenes from his childhood, as well as tragic moments from the concentration camp where his family was murdered. Gradually, he starts to weave in true events and places. When villagers begin to take part, his monologue turns into a proper theatrical performance, an attraction that makes the village famous. But Frank is not who he claims to be.
The aforementioned tale, however, is not the play you get to watch in La Obra. Avant-garde director Mariano Pensotti, who moves between documentary and fiction, sets Frank’s story in the background. Pensotti’s hero in La Obra is a director, his alter ego, who visits that Argentinian village in order to put on a show based on the testimonies of the villagers who partook in Frank’s story. But Frank’s tale is not real at all, even though Pensotti treats it as such. To present it, Pensotti creates a fictional director who wants to make a documentary about it. Got all that?