A triptych around possible reconciliations
After Vivantes, two new chapters are created at the Festival d’Avignon 2025: Nos vies à venir et Réuni·es. A triptych that explores the possibility of reconciliation at the heart of the lives of the participants.
In Réuni·es, Aurélie Charon hands the microphone to Yannick Kamanzi (Rwanda), Karam Al Kafri (Syria/Palestine) and Sihame El Mesbahi (France/Morocco). 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 16, 2025 at the Benoît XII room as part of the Avignon Festival
We leave from Kigali in Rwanda, we arrive in the district of Montclar in Avignon via Damascus. I don’t know if we can say that we met in each of these places. But we try.
We first unite multiple identities: Yannick is of Rwandan and Congolese origin, Karam is a Syrian Palestinian, Sihame grew up in France with parents from Morocco. It’s already not to let oneself be locked in boxes.
We went together to Kigali and to the south of Rwanda, to Butare. At Yannick’s, at his parents’, family’s, friends’, with Sihame and Karam. The preliminary questions for us to meet are: reconciliation and justice. It was a program in Rwanda after the genocide against the Tutsis of 1994. Yannick’s family learned what had happened to their 13 years later, during a gacaca session, of the popular courts. We were in Kigali during the week of commemoration, 31 years after the genocide. We went to see the next generation: how do we recover from a traumatic memory that we inherited?
Karam returned to Damascus after 12 years in exile last February. The question of justice is strongly raised, disillusions have been great since the fall of the Assad regime. Even if there is no ready-made formula, the transmission of experience was strong: Karam’s father had told him “ask them, in Kigali, how they did it so that we knew what to do!”.
Sihame grew up in Monclar, from parents who came from Morocco. His father came at 18 as a farm worker, the family followed years later. Sihame is the only one of the brothers and sisters to have been born in Avignon, France. From her adolescence, she committed herself against social inequalities, left at 18 to Paris at Sciences Po, and is now pursuing her law studies.
There will be no magic formula, but Yannick, Karam and Sihame make the journey from Kigali to Avignon to put at the heart of their lives, the desire for justice.