2023-12-15 12:11:43
BarcelonaA prestigious theater director. A young actress. A job opportunity. After a few weeks of rehearsal, he ends up harassing the girl and creating a rare working climate with the whole company. Abuse of power until all are planted. This is the story of Ladybitcha German film with a Catalan accent.
Just the week that ARA published the report on abuse of power and harassment at the Institut del Teatre, a girl from Vilanova i la Geltrú and her partner, a girl from Berlin, started writing the script for this German film about a playwright who abuses his power. Marina Prados (1994) and Paula Knüpling (1995) started from their own experiences, the first at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona, the second at the Volksbühne in Berlin, and finished outlining the plot with their contributions actors and actresses who joined the project.
Ladybitch premiered in January 2022, won several awards in Germany and can now be seen on the Franco-German channel Arte. In the film, Ela plays Lulú, a character from classical German theater who is very common in the workshops of the Theater Institute. Ela runs into her theater director, named Franz Kramer. “He’s not the devil, we didn’t want a character that was just evil; he even thinks he’s a feminist,” explains Knüpling. “This is precisely his own tragedy, he is not aware of his actions,” adds Prados, who met “many versions” of Kramer at the Theater Institute, where he studied. During filming, hugging the actor playing the theater director was “healing” and “cathartic.” They were able to park the grudge and the darkness accumulated by their own experiences. “I’ve had the feeling of going back to situations in the past and saying ‘watch, you didn’t set the boundaries right here’. We made the character take care of himself better than we did. Rewriting it meant thinking about how we would have liked to have responded when we were young people”, reflects the villager.
“I came home”
In the work – which was initially supposed to be a theatrical piece but which with the covid mutated into an audiovisual one -, Kramer verbalizes a phrase that has been “felt a lot” at the Theater Institute: “If you want to continue working, in we talk at home.” The boundaries between what is professional and what is personal are crossed, and the student or actress on duty is put on the ropes. “At 20 years old it’s hard to see, you think maybe nothing will happen, you want to please the director, the teacher, and it’s hard to say no. Leaving, not accepting, has consequences,” explains Prados, who emphasizes manipulation what is behind these powerful characters. “You are afraid of not working again, they have a lot of power; if they speak badly of you, the theater is over,” Knüpling summarizes.
“We started writing the play the week the article came out. We were in Berlin and we felt far away, because we would have liked to be at the demonstrations that took place in Barcelona. It was very important that it happened, it had to happen from from a long time ago. Now there will not be so much silence, the new generations will not accept the abuses, neither sexual nor of power, that there were”, notes Prados, before her companion, with whom they met in a theatrical exchange in 2016 between the Sala Beckett and the Volksbühne, he interrupted: “You were very moved by everything that happened.” The problem, however, is that the people did not see themselves strongly enough – because they felt alone and unprotected – to file a complaint against the teachers: “With a trial it would have been better to close. Many things happened, at the Institute of the Theatre”.
The two actresses, now turned directors, are clear that Barcelona is “two steps ahead” of Germany in the fight against abuse. The work of the media, documentaries like The yellow roof of Isabel Coixet or the case of La Manada, according to them, make the Spanish state go ahead in this matter. In fact, his is the first work within the German market that talks about abuses in the theater sector.
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