Bonobo

Josep Julien

A frenetic road movie. Can we escape the violence?


Fadi has a goal. The process that started a few years ago is about to end. His legs are shaking and, for the first time in many months of training, he finds himself unable to drive the van to his terrifying target. An unforeseen event at a petrol station will disrupt his plans and force him to flee in the form of a road movie through much of the geography of the country.


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On the afternoon of 21 August 2017, Younes, a twenty-year-old boy, was shot down by the Catalan police in a vineyard in the municipality of Subirats, in the Alt Penedès region. Right alongside home. Indeed, my family and I live very close to where that kid from Ripoll ended his delirious and horrible journey. Very close. So much so that we were involuntary witnesses to everything.

That late afternoon has not stopped bouncing around inside of me ever since. And it hurts. A strange, difficult pain.


Bonobo is a thriller, a desperate road movie, a flight forward. And it is also a tool that I have invented, sheltering myself in the enormous power of fiction, to deprive that post-adolescent corpse of its status as a person, to make it a character and thus be able to ask the questions that cause me this pain. Questions that seem crucial to me in the moral and socio-political context of this first half of the century. I wonder who he is and who we are. I wonder if there is a real chance of redemption. I wonder about hate, and pity, as drivers and intrinsic values of humans. About the fragility of our convictions, our identity, and the existence or not of second chances in people's lives. Many questions. Not enough.


Josep Julien

• Show included in the season tickets.