Avignon (AFP)

In the first story, it is the Tunisian father who has been stricken from the family card, in the second, it is the Algerian grandfather.

In Avignon, two pieces punched, one autobiographical, the other fictitious, mix intimacy and politics to tell how historical trauma such as the Battle of Bizerte or the massacre of Algerians in Paris in October 1961, have irreparably blows up mixed families.

Presented among the 1,600 pieces of the abundant festival "off" Avignon, "Final Cut" is told and played by Myriam Saduis who is also the heroine. Her name was Saâdaoui before her maternal family - Italians who left Tunisia in 1958 for France - did not eradicate her Tunisian father from her life.

In the humor-free play, most of the time alone on stage, she tells how she discovers for the first time the face of this father through photo negatives kept by his mother.

- "Do not be assigned"

"For me, it was like a metaphor of French colonialism.There is a denial, + negative + in the collective memory that are waiting to be revealed," says the director and 56-year-old actress established in Belgium.

"Once we reveal them, we can put them in an album and move on," she adds.

After several years of psychoanalysis, she says she is at peace with this traumatic past.

It was in 1961, with the battle of the Tunisian naval base of Bizerte still occupied by the French troops, that her father and her mother, then pregnant with her, decided to leave for France. But they are caught, on October 17 of the same year in Paris, by the bloody repression of a peaceful demonstration at the call of the Algerian FLN against a curfew imposed by Maurice Papon.

"My parents are projected in a context where racism is at its height, where my father by the mere fact of being an Arab is looked on," says Myriam Saduis.

She relates how, under the 1972 law, her mother decided to frenchify her name, allowing her to "not be assigned + immigrant girl". Then how this mother, persecuted by her family for having loved an Arab, had the father expelled from France.

It was only at the age of 40, at the death of her mother, that the director met for the first time her paternal family in Tunisia (her relatives were upset at a performance of the play in Tunis ).

Stressing the importance of Emmanuel Macron's decision to open the archives of the Algerian war, she believes that "we are witnessing the children and grandchildren of the former colonized".

"And these words begin to be heard," citing Alice Cherki, author of "The Invisible Frontier", or Alice Zeniter, Goncourt High School Students' Award in 2017 for "The Art of Losing" on her grandfather harki.

- The intimate damaged by politics -

In "Quays of the Seine" of the Romanian Alexandra Badea, it is another couple, Irene, black foot and Younes the Algerian, who landed in Paris during the war of Algeria, before being separated in the wake of the 17 October 1961.

"What is shocking is that it happened here, in the streets we cross, on this bridge," she told AFP in reference to the bridge Saint-Michel where a commemorative stele is erected .

The play is the second part of a trilogy, which had already dealt with the massacre of Senegalese soldiers by the French army in 1944 in Thiaroye near Dakar.

In a back-and-forth between past and present, a young girl, Nora, is looking for her origins. Behind, a screen that turns on and off at the discretion of the scenes, his grandparents love each other then tear themselves apart.

"A girl told me the story of her Algerian grandfather, whom we never spoke about," says Alexandra Badea. "What interested me was how the politics damaged the intimate," adds the playwright.

"We have to confront these stories by naming them, otherwise they continue to generate frustration, non-recognition, violence," she says.

© 2019 AFP