RECYCLING MEDEA

A film by Asteris Kutulas • Music by Mikis Theodorakis • Choreography by Renato Zanella
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Anne Frank

Few words about Anne Frank and the film “Recycling Medea”

To me, Anne Frank is a symbol of innocence lost and destroyed. Or, in other words, a symbol of humanity and tangible creativity. By referencing the memory of an exemplary fate like that of Anne Frank we add a historic dimension to our film “Recycling Medea”, one transcending both the “private framework” – a mother killing her own children – but also the “political” context – Greece kills its own children. Although each generation of parents has the chance to recognise that – time and again – innocent adolescents, including their own children, become the victims of brutally executed and escalating conflicts, the means of war are chosen and the ties of life that have carried each of us from the first spark of life up to the present day are severed forever. With each murder, the light of life passed from one human to the next becomes a little bit dimmer.
This humanist dimension is inherent in Euripides’ tragedy and Theodorakis’ music. A dimension that also surfaces in the diary document and recovered legacy of fourteen-year-old Anne Frank. This diary allows us to experience what “Auschwitz” – as the geographic, tangible epitome of a total denial of life – really meant. “Auschwitz” is the “most terribly” inhumane thing that has happened so far – because it symbolises an “industrial” destruction of life for racist reasons – and I am convinced that we need to remember it time and again to ensure that it does not happen again. Any year could become a new “1933”.
Ever since Euripides, the Medea material has been interpreted hundreds of times in music and literature, but we are the first to put the victims, the children and adolescents, centre stage. What makes it so fascinating is that Anne Frank’s writing, in its earnest naivety and accompanied by Medea’s arias to her children just before she takes their lives, exudes an incredible passion and clarity. While the inhumane might surface with a different face in every age, it invariably poses a threat to human dignity and human existence. With our “Recycling Medea” film, we want create a memorial for Anne Frank and each young generation that has been sacrificed to war, calamity and poverty.

Asteris Kutulas, November 2012

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  • foto © Ina Kutulas