Who Killed My Father

Édouard Louis is young and angry and raises his voice against all social injustice. His credo as a writer is: “Literature must fight, for all those who cannot fight themselves.” Louis knows what he is talking about. As a teenager, he leaves home because he can no longer stand the confinement, the rejection and violence he experiences from his parents, especially his father. He starts a new life as a young gay man in Paris, turns his life story into a novel, the angry document of a self-liberation: The End of Eddy. He becomes the shooting star of the literary and intellectual scene in Europe. But he is not finished with the story of his family – which is also the story of a generation and a country. As a child, Louis witnessed his father fall victim to welfare cuts after an accident at work and could only work as a street sweeper. If Louis’ anger in his first book was directed at his parents, in Who Killed My Father he is full of compassion for his father and now understands his outbursts of anger and despair. His return to him becomes a deeply moving tribute to his own father and his failed dreams.

And more than that. It is a portrait of people who, as the most vulnerable, have no place in society. People who are overlooked and left behind, by social politicians, by the ruling class, for decades. Édouard Louis settles accounts: with a system and its decision-makers. “I want these names to be as unforgettable as Shakespeare’s Richard III or Jack the Ripper.”

Young Polish director Mateusz Staniak brings this emotional and urgent material to the stage in a region facing similar social issues with the end of mining and the beginning of the post-industrial era. “The core problem of our political system is that it is still based on experiences of privileged people, for whom concepts like ‘poverty’ and ‘having nothing’ are completely abstract,” he says. “Stigmatization of people and the loss of their dignity follow from this. They create a domino effect that leads to alienation and hopelessness. Our job is to understand the oppressive power that comes from the unequal distribution of knowledge and property.” Who Killed My Father is his directorial debut in Germany.