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Screening of the documentary Reas. Script and direction: Lola Arias
Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque
12 November – 20:00
At the end of the documentary, there will be a discussion with the cast
Lola Arias’ film Reas was one of the sensations at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival. In it, the Argentine writer, theatre-maker and filmmaker blends fiction and documentary in a fascinating mix of realist and musical drama, telling the stories of several women inside a prison.
Arias had held film and theatre workshops in 2019 at Ezeiza women’s prison in Buenos Aires. From those encounters, Reas was born. As the filmmaker and one of the leading voices in documentary theatre explained, she did not want to create a prison drama but to focus “on the bonds of love and community between cis women and trans people that keep them alive in a space of confinement and violence.”
Shortly afterwards, she released Los días afuera. This time, the territory of representation shifted to the theatre. The action moves from prison to the street, as the characters from Reas (four cis women and two trans people: a trans woman and a trans man) are released and try to rebuild their lives while facing the barriers of their criminal records.
Following the same documentary and musical language as the film, Los días afuera allows the characters, as Arias explains, to “relive their lives as fiction and invent, through fantasy and imagination, a possible future.” To do so, they reconstruct scenes from their past (nights of searches, their participation in art workshops, their studies, the formation of a rock band) and project themselves into the future by singing, dancing and performing. They do this in a scenography that creates a space somewhere between a construction site and a film set.
On stage, a car takes the characters on a journey through time. We see Nacho, who works as a taxi driver and plays in a rock band; Paulita, who sings cumbia while working in an underground textile workshop; and Noelia, who earns her living doing sex work while organising dance parties and demonstrations for trans visibility. Each in their own way reflects, as Lola Arias puts it, “what happens to a person who goes out into the world and has to rebuild their life, their affections, find a job, a home.”
