AVENIR

DIRECTOR: BASILIO MARITANO SAILER
2027 | FEATURE DOCUMENTARY | 90 min.

From a hand-dug quarry in a self-built neighbourhood in Burkina Faso, a group of young people creates monologues shaped by personal experiences, fears and visions of the war in the Sahel. For most of them, it is a first encounter with theatre.

Through writing, rehearsal and performance, they approach the wounds of violence, radicalisation, loss and guilt, giving voice to both victims and perpetrators. The quarry, known as “the hole,” becomes more than a stage. Surrounded by dust, heat and everyday life, it turns into an open amphitheatre where imagination confronts a fractured reality.

Children watch from the edges, neighbours gather, and daily life continues around the performance. The boundary between theatre and the world outside remains porous. Alongside this process, archive images interrupt the space of rehearsal and fiction: fragments of war, military presence and the struggle to restore peace.

These images bring the conflict back into the film as a mediated reality, contrasting with the fragile, embodied voices of the young performers. Between archive and theatre, AVENIR searches for another way of looking at violence: through art as a shared space in which collective memory can be voiced, embodied and reimagined. No resolution follows. What remains is a shared need to seek a lost peace and invoke it back to earth.