“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 Covi, 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. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: Antigone in the Amazon is actually part of a trilogy, which includes Orestes in Mosul (2019), staged in what was once the capital of the Islamic State, and The New Gospel, set in the refugee camps of southern Italy. So I’m curious to hear more about this continuing use of the “founding myths of Western civilization” as a template for exploring today’s crises. Why did you decide to go in this direction in the first place? And was a trilogy planned from the start?

MILO RAU: Yes. I love the form of trilogies because it suits my approach to a new project. The first part, I explore the form. The second part, I start to understand and master the form. The third part, I finish the form. So I knew for years that this would always be a trilogy, though it finished three years later than we’d predicted. For me, the blueprint is super interesting. The question of this trilogy is, how can we globalize the European canon? How and where can the Bible, for example, become a necessity, and regain its revolutionary power again?

Though with Antigone specifically I didn’t have the topic. The Landless Workers’ Movement approached me when I was touring in Brazil and asked if I wanted to work with them—a story told in the play, too. We knew we needed a choir, and we wanted to have this antagonism between a traditional society and a modern society. And we found there were these parallels—like the unburied body—between Sophocles’s story and the history of the workers’ movement itself. Whereas with a piece like Oresteia there were these questions of forgiveness and the circle of violence, also present in the former capital of the Islamic State. I guess within the nucleus of all my work is just this desire to touch the deepest tragedy of humanity.

D: I’m also very interested in this concept of “utopian documentarism.” When I last interviewed you, I remember you spoke of creating “a situation together” with your local collaborators and then documenting it. You said it was like “being the author and the documentarist of a film at the same time.” So how did this idea originate and develop over the various projects?

MR: The idea of utopian documentarism really involves trying to create a situation that itself creates something else unplanned. Then I try to follow and describe what happens while staging it. So there’s this dialectic between documenting and creating. Of course there’s a toolbox that I use—a context, a blueprint or story that I know and can share with others. For example, Oresteia is extremely well known in Mosul. The conflict in Antigone is very known by the people in the north of Brazil. 

So I try to dive into this with a group of what you would call “experts”—local, artistic—and together we try to tell what happened when we tried to stage Antigone. I need the tension of having a frame but not knowing exactly what will happen within this frame. But when I find the frame, then we go there and see if it works. That’s when I have the elements. And from there I’m now quite experienced and able to just let things go.  

Of course, it’s different for a film versus a play. With the play, there’s still the montage at the end, but with a film, you can produce much more material so you are freer with the montage. In theater, you need to know a bit better what you want. You have less time, but the tempo of montage is much slower onstage. Ninety minutes of theater means much less information than ninety minutes of film. 

D: How did the production process actually work? Combining the story of Antigone with a real-life movement (and massacre) with an explanatory narration of the process itself seems rather daunting.

MR: There are three parallel layers. The first is the making of, which is how the play starts. Telling the story of how we were touring in Brazil with these two plays, which after Sao Paolo were forbidden in other cities because of the conservative mayors from the party of ex-President Bolsonaro. At that moment the Landless Workers’ Movement approached me and said, “Why don’t we work together?” They are used to doing theater, they have a big theater department. Augusto Boal had done a lot of projects together with them. So we considered this together, and that’s what we tell in the play. 

Then we found many parallels between Antigone and the movement itself. So there’s the massacre, which is in the beginning of the play and also in the beginning of the movement in the ’90s. There was this attack by the military police in the very north, in the state of Pará, sowing violence in order to disrupt the organizing. We began working with the founding generation from the ’80s and ’90s, and also the youngsters of today—their sons, grandsons, granddaughters. Together we started to rehearse, which is told in the story, too. Interestingly, we decided to stage it on the day of the massacre on the very block where the violence occurred as part of the healing ceremony. 

D: I also recall your calling yourself an “interventionist” during out last interview, and noting that “the central problem of all so-called documentarism is that it doesn’t reflect the role of the author of the film, doesn’t show the making-of, the border in between fiction and reality.” That really struck me while watching Antigone in the Amazon as the behind-the-scenes aspect is really front and center. So why is it so important for you to reveal this “border in between fiction and reality”?

MR: One point of my manifesto is that it’s not important what exactly is represented—but that the representation itself becomes real. So it’s not about telling the real. With Antigone it’s important to say that that’s how the massacre happened, that’s what the survivors remember, etc. But it’s also important to see that this is an act, actually, of the Landless Movement. To say, “We want to correct history. We want to spread the message. We want to do a play, a reinterpretation or even a re-appropriation, of this myth Antigone, of this text.” Which they can then use as a tool in their political fight. 

What is the fight of Antigone today? What is the Polyneices (the dead brother who is not buried) of today in Brazil where so many people are still disappearing? We need this kind of mirror to see how we collaborate between Europe and Brazil. Personally, whenever I watch a film or read a book I will seek out interviews with the makers. What is the impact of this work? What is the historic moment in which this film was made? Why was this made? What was the motivation? Who participated in the making of this film? For me, an art piece is the crystallization of the process of making it. That’s the beautiful thing, that as a maker I can take this line between the fiction, the product, and the facts of what happened when we created it. I can make it transparent. I can show it and I can somehow play with it. 

The real story is what happened while we were trying together to tell the story. The problems we confronted, perhaps the impossibilities. The moments of beauty. Because telling a story together creates another story. 

D: Orestes in Mosul resulted in the founding of a film school in collaboration with UNESCO, while The New Gospel propelled the establishment of a distribution network for fairly produced tomatoes, which has allowed over a thousand migrants to obtain work contracts. So what is your impact plan for Antigone in the Amazon?

MR: In the case of The New Gospel, all these people get papers through the work in the fields and the fair-trade tomato production get regularized—they became citizens of Europe and not slaves anymore. 

With the film school in Mosul, I understood that distributing plays or traveling as somebody from Mosul is impossible—they’ll never get visas for Europe. So we had to find another distribution network. How can the people become the producers themselves? How can they get into the distribution networks that we as Europeans get by birth? We can travel, we can sell our films, we can go to film schools. We have access to all these things. And by the way, I was struck by how fast these students in Mosul learned everything I know. They became as good directors as I am on a technical level in a matter of months! 

In the case of Antigone we have three outcomes. One is the “stop the greenwashing” campaign. Some big companies, including Swiss companies, exploit the Amazon under the label of sustainability. We blamed them, alerted people like Angela Davis, spread the word in newspapers. Another outcome involves the Landless Worker’s Movement, one of the biggest producers of rice and chocolate, but they can’t bring their products to Europe. Like we did with tomato production, we have spread the word in Europe, emphasizing the fair trade and biologically sustainable aspects of these products.

The third thing, perhaps the most important, is the propaganda. The members of the Landless Workers’ Movement travel very often with us, and we introduce them to politicians and to NGOs. Brazilian agribusinesses and the far right still see them as terrorists, so it’s very important that they connect with people like the minister in France, the president in Austria, etc., so they can visibly support them. 

The last point I’ll add is that every euro we get through touring goes directly to the Landless Worker’s Movement—totalling several hundred thousand euros. Because we, the actors, the technicians, already get paid. Everything over that, what would normally land on my table or that of my co-writers, goes to their cause. They use it for their actions and to further their political work.

Lauren Wissot is a film critic and journalist, filmmaker and programmer, and a contributing editor at both Filmmaker magazine and Documentary magazine. She also writes regularly for Modern Times Review (The European Documentary Magazine) and has served as the director of programming at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival.