Als het leven zelf

Both onstage and backstage, director Rosemarie Blank filmed the actors of Ramba Zamba, a Berlin theatre company for mentally disabled people. Behind the scenes, too, the actors are usually dressed for their parts. This blurs the boundaries between their personal reality and their role. What happens in the dressing room appears just as theatrical as the performances themselves - contemporary versions of classic tragedies like Medea and Orpheus. Modern drama, with sparse music and bare, abstract settings. The rehearsals and performances are emotion-ridden; a lot of crying, comforting, professing of love and quarrelling goes on. The actors often speak a language which is hard to understand for outsiders, but amongst themselves they understand each other perfectly. These actors live in their own world, as if on another planet.