Review: After the Silence

"Kinship is strength" says Juliana França, in a stirring, century-spanning speech. Collapsing borders between theatre and film, reality and fiction, and the historical and present day, After the Silence traces a lineage between silenced activists, murdered decades apart. Written and directed by Christiane Jatahy, this visually stunning, deeply sophisticated work of documentary theatre faces the violent legacy of slavery and colonialism in Brazil. Four performers (França, Gal Pereira, Caju Bezerra and Aduni Guedes) slip in and out of roles, watching each other with transfixed attention as they sometimes become the sisters in Itamar Vieira Junior's award-winning Torto Arado, a novel set amid the corrupt farming practices which enforced plantation slavery long after Brazil's official abolition.

Intensely meta-textual, After the Silence also combines footage from the 1984 documentary Caba Marcado Para Morrer, about the murder of a union leader, with the company's own, fictional documentary filmed with present-day residents of the Chapada Diamantina, where Torto Arado also takes place. These narratives slip against and past each other, melding into a magical, unsettling, indistinct 'now' which feels both centuries old and horrifyingly present. 

A wide screen shows sky-high drone shots of lush green forests and archival footage, but most powerfully, during the jarê rituals, the town's residents are presented true-to-height, allowing the actors to stand amongst them. It feels as if a portal has been opened, breaching the seam between stage and screen, Edinburgh and Bahia. The music (designed by Vitor Araújo and Guedes) is blood-stirring, often mimicking a racing heart or running feet, but most powerful is how Jatahy's text allows hundreds of years of violently repressed Afro-Brazilian history to speak – loudly, and in kinship – all at once.