La Fête • Anne-Cécile Vandalem Joëlle Sambi

With the new cycle of creations titled Haunted worlds, Anne-Cécile Vandalem is launching into a highly anticipated new creative series. The starting point refers to an event that occurred in 2018: the death of the student Sanda Dia during a hazing activity organized by a circle of ‘bright young things’ in Flanders. The eighteen defendants received light sentences of community service. Drawing on this tragedy, Anne-Cécile Vandalem and writer Joëlle Sambi imagined a follow-up: a meeting, two years after the trial, of the victim’s family and the families of two of those convicted. The meeting, held in a villa on the North Sea coast, is orchestrated by a documentary film-maker who hopes to capture a gesture of reconciliation. But what was meant to be a space for healing turns into a tense, closed-door encounter where fingers are pointed. La Fête sets in motion a mechanism of formidable intelligence to expose the violence of privilege and confront us with our own blind spots. A brilliant exercise in truth-seeking. The stories discussed refer to acts of violence. Première Coproduction Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles Copresentation KVS