The crumbs of the American dream
Tell Sergi Pompermayerwhich has always had a special relationship, contradictory to the American continent. A relationship that bases between love and hatred. By the father who came from there and who carries the surname and the wound. Of the father who disappeared from his life, when the playwright was only three years old. Of all the contradictions that define the continent. The dreamed place and the dreaded place. The land where it has sank its nails in this second part of its trilogy. To start up stories that are ignored, which have never been told, buried in so much shame and ignorance.
Pere Arquillué directs Eduard Buch, Guillem Balart, Joan Carreras, Mar Pawlowsky, Maria Morera, Mireia Aixalà in ‘Grand Canyon’
If in the first part, the acclaimed America (2024), the author made a general plan and focused on the Catalan slave past and the business of the bourgeoisie that made a fortune with the 19th century Cuba, to talk about the inherent racism that crosses the past and the present; Now, the camera’s goal is approaching a specific area of that map: the Grand Canyon. One of the most impressive landscapes that exist. If in the first he explained the legacy of a nightmare buried by the weight of the story, the author now unmask the American dream and makes him the only possible escape when the world drowns, when you have nothing to lose.
A documentary landscape that, under the beauty of its lands, hides a terrible story. The Navajos and Hopis, the indigenous tribes of Arizona, who in 1.680 revolted against the Spanish colonizers-the first whites who arrived there-and the Franciscan missionaries to kill them and expel them from their lands fed up with the abuses they subjected to them. Until that time they had been a peaceful people. “Small people of peace” means their name.
“The great changes are only started by those who, in front of them, only see their destruction, their death. Will you fight or do the jerk? », A Hopi tells Peter, the protagonist of the ‘Grand Canyon‘At a key moment in the play.
“The Grand Canyon“, Which Pompermayer wrote long before Americais a work of losers, of survivors. Of people who want to flee the reality that crushes them but who do not have the resources or the strength to change it. Of humble, disenchanted people. In a village in inland Catalonia, a burning summer night, there are a series of characters that struggle to survive. This is a visionary prostitutes listening, of workers without work, of women who lies in launching the family, of parents who do not know how to love themselves, of tired marriages of so disappointment, of young people who aspire to a better world. Of young people who revolt against the power that oppresses them. That of politicians, those of the imposed crown, that of the authority, that of the patriarchal system.
It is also the story of lost dreams, crushed, torn and of those who only have the faded songs that had to be the reproduction list of the trip to the reddish paradise: the Stones, Drive by Truckersthe Allman Brothers, her Janis Joplin. A journey of no return, a pending trip, a dreamed journey that can no longer be. Too late for the struggles. Even by the crumbs of the American dream.
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