FUTURELAND
Video design for a theatre piece by LOLA ARIAS.
3D animation generated live in Unity game engine including real time text to speech mouth movement for the avatars. Front and rear projection, live camera.
What drives a teenager to set out on a lonely, dangerous journey to an unknown land? Under what circumstances do parents send their own children away so that they might be saved? What does it say about our society that millions of children risk their lives to cross borders and travel for months or years in search of a better future
Half the refugees in Europe are minors, many of them unaccompanied. The children and young people who come to Europe are driven by a survival instinct, and confronted with a system that protects them only temporarily. According to German asylum law, no unaccompanied minor can be deported. In other words, children are safe until they turn eighteen. But what kind of future are we giving to these children if they are afraid to become adults?
Futureland is a science-fiction documentary piece with teenagers aged 14 to 18, who came to Germany alone from Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Guinea, Bangladesh. They crossed the world on foot, by boat, hidden in a truck, and sometimes by plane. Now they live in Berlin among social workers, youth welfare employees, tutors, and other young people like them, all from very different cultures.
These are teenagers who have landed in a new world where they don’t know the rules. They are still in a grace period: they can stay but they don’t know for how long. They do constant auditions to prove that they deserve asylum, a chance in a school, a place in a group of friends. They are in between cultures, in between children and adults, and in between past, present and future, searching for their own identity.
Futureland is a video game piece born out of the imagination of those who have survived and are now inventing their own future.
DIRECTION AND TEXT Lola Arias
WITH Mamadou Allou Diallo, Ahmad Azrati, Fabiya Bhuiyan, Mohamed Haj Younis, Bashar Kanan, Sagal Odowa, May Saada, Sarah Safi
ARTISTIC ADVICE Bibiana Picado Mendes
SET Dominic Huber
VIDEO Mikko Gaestel
3D ANIMATION AND VIDEO ASSISTANCE Luis August Krawen
MUSIC Santiago Blaum
COSTUMES Tutia Schaad
CHOREOGRAPHY Colette Sadler
DRAMATURGY Johanna Höhmann (Gorki), Florian Malzacher (Ruhrtriennale)
PRODUCTION Dag Lohde
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Laura Jiménez González
TRANSLATION TEXT AND ARTISTIC ASSISTANCE Laura Cecilia Nicolás
RESEARCH AND CASTING Hannah Baumann
SPEECH TRAINING Deborah Ziegler
SET ASSISTANCE Stephanie Zurstegge
COSTUMES ASSISTANCE Lenna Stam
SOUFFLAGE Christian Müller
