A triptych around possible reconciliations
After Vivantes, two new chapters are created at the Festival d’Avignon 2025: Nos vies à venir and Réuni·es. A triptych that explores the possibility of reconciliation at the heart of the lives of the participants.
In Our Lives to Come, Aurélie Charon hands the microphone to Amir Hassan (Gaza), Hala Rajab (Syria) and Rayane Jawhary (Lebanon). They are three on stage every evening and share intimate, family, artistic or activist spaces that have been shaken by the violence of conflicts.
Creation on July 15, 2025 at the Benoît XII room as part of the Avignon Festival
Palestine, Liban, Syrie
What doesn’t exist yet, that’s what interests us. We fight for the lives we don’t have yet: those that we intend to live well, that are to come. They perhaps deserve even more attention than those we are experiencing. Rayane Jawari in Hermel, northern Lebanon, founded with other young women a secular school, “Esprits libres,” to train citizens who will be able to think and vote for themselves.
Hala was also a “free spirit” when she grew up in the Latakia region of Syria. His father Odey Rajab, an opponent of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, fought against the dictatorship and raised his three daughters to be free and independent. He believed in the revolution but was arrested and killed by the regime in 2015. Hala, in France since then, has become a filmmaker and explores the means of transmission of fiction and cinema.
The participants•es
It took a ‘free spirit’ in Gaza to imagine a teenager being able to leave the closed borders one day. Amir started learning French at 18, fell in love with the language, and won a scholarship with his poems to come to Paris, Arabic assistant at the Henry IV high school.
Since then, Amir has been a poet, journalist, and teacher. In September 2023, he returns to Gaza to visit his family. From Gaza under the bombs in October 2023, Amir sends me this text ‘I am doing my adult duty not to fall into hatred’. So we focus on our adult duties to save the children and make what is to come heard.
Perhaps free minds are those who attach enough importance to what does not yet exist.