Riding on a cloud

Is it possible for an artist to use fiction in order to tell the truth? Newspaper reports, photographs, film and other material provoke amusing yet keen observations of how truth is constructed.

Pictures; one disappears and another appears. Most of the time, he doesn’t understand the connection between a picture and the one next to it. He needs someone who knows him well to tell about it and set the picture in motion, so it’s not still anymore.
When memories in head are like still pictures with no scenes from the past, how the memory works?

The Lebanese director Rabih Mroué is one of the most important voices of the contemporary Arabic arts scene. He creates intimate, humorous and intelligent theatre, always critically deconstructing the things we call ‘truth’.

Riding on a cloud is an impressive combination of the personal and political: For this performance, he invites his brother Yasser to play the role of a character that resembles him personally. A person, who was injured in the Lebanese civil war and lost his ability to use words, Yasser began to shoot videos, which fuse with his recounted memories on stage to form a subjective picture of the political developments in Lebanon. Riding on a cloud also describes the fragile construction of biography, which emerges between political reality, memories, facts and fiction. For Mroué this is always the starting point for artistic self-reflection, which he then transposes for the theatre and exhibitions.

In Arabic, with English surtitles