Les Lettres de Mon Père

A red sofa, a table, a marionette and various objects help director Agnès Limbos tell her story. In 1959, her family is living in Congo, then a Belgian colony, which would become independent in the following years. The parents decide to stay and send their children back to Belgium, where they are put under the care of a priest uncle. Agnès, who was eight at the time, felt this event as an abandonment. On the stage, the now 70-year-old woman engages in dialogue with that little girl, as she reads the letters sent by her father to his children, awaited with a mixture of impatience and a longing for vindication. Out of these paternal lines, read in the present day, emanates a different view of past events, both individual and collective, like the patronising racism of the missionary spirit. In Les Lettres de Mon Père [Letters From My Father], little puppet-Agnès and grown-up puppeteer-Agnès look at themselves in the mirror of the passing time, as they retell not only their story but the history of a whole age.