For her research project “Common Ground“, Yael Ronen once again works with her cast’s biographies. They are playing their own family stories, dealing with the Yugoslav War and their lives as actors in Berlin today and as children in the early 1990s – children of perpetrators and of victims alike. Like Jasmina Musić and Mateja Meded: The father of one of them died in a camp where the father of the other was a guard. Together with Yael Ronen, an Israeli living in Berlin, they took a journey to the “Common Ground”, their old home, Bosnia. They are accompanied by a German and an Israeli, whose clueless outsider’s perspective provides both distance and comic relief to this fierce, searching investigation of history, of oneself and the others.
It is an evening of great emotional power, addressing the task of reconciliation and acceptance without raised forefingers, polemics or truisms – and with no fear of big emotions and huge giggles.