The Montaigne estate, somewhere in northern Algeria. Six hundred and fifty-three hectares transformed into farmland where eucalyptus, vines, oats and wheat are cultivated. This land has long been ruled by the Saint-André family—or rather, ever since they settled there in the mid-nineteenth century, like so many other families participating in the French colonial settlement project in Algeria.

In a choral narrative, the voices of six members of this family intertwine, each recounting in their own way the collapse of their world during the Algerian War of Independence. Bringing together five actors on a stage inhabited by the paintings of Kabyle artist Kamel Khélif, Célie Pauthe gives voice to this chorus of characters whose violent contradictions expose the madness of the colonial system—French, but not exclusively so—along with its self-destructive rage and pathological nostalgia.

For the first time, the director brings to the stage the burning, baroque and relentless language of novelist Mathieu Belezi, adapting the first of the four novels he devoted to the French colonisation of Algeria. Through this story, weaving together the voices of the dead and the living, Célie Pauthe invites us to “look History straight in the eye”, borrowing the words of German playwright Heiner Müller, and to reopen the unfinished history of colonisation, whose destructive logics continue to shape our present.