Film review: A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836718769696 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Author | Stefanie Kappler |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Film review |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718769696
Cooperation and Conflict
2018, Vol. 53(4) 545 –548
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836718769696
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Film review
MICHAEL LESSAC (dir), A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake. New York, USA: Saboteur Media, 2014.
What do South Africa, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo have
in common? A history of conflict and violence respectively, one might say, but not much
more. And still, a team of theatre directors, composers and actors took the story of South
Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) around the world in a theatre play
to explore its impacts on post-conflict societies elsewhere. They then made a film, ‘A
Snake Gives Birth to a Snake’, to capture not only the performance itself, but also its
interaction with the diverse audiences. In that sense, the viewer is confronted with two
different levels of understanding: one level derives from the performance itself, but
another one emerges from the film’s focus on the theatre play. The viewer is thus con-
stantly moving between the theatre performance and the film’s reflection on it, and the
friction between those two levels creates a tension that makes the viewers constantly
balance one against the other.
The point of departure for the idea of develop a travelling theatre piece might be a
simple one: sometimes one’s own traumas render so vulnerable that it is too hard to talk
about them directly. Instead, somebody else’s story might be an avenue to access this
pain and at the same time provide the language needed to talk about the universal experi-
ence of loss, suffering and conflict. As we know from various studies on the importance
of art therapy for dealing with trauma, the arts can provide a means and language to do
so (cf. Appleton, 2001; Baker, 2006; Bennett, 2005).
By zooming in on the perspectives of the young interpreters of the TRC, the theatre
play (and with it, the film) picks an interesting perspective of in-betweenness. At the
beginning of the film, there is a conversation among the interpreters who used to work in
the TRC. They discussed their own position in the commission, which for them was
often awkward. Whilst they were expected to be detached and non-emotional in the face
of the traumatic narratives they had to translate, they felt deeply involved in the systems
of injustice that had shaped their society for decades, if not longer. Being an interpreter
for the TRC also meant for them that they had to confront a traumatic body of knowledge
on a daily basis.
It is this tension between insider and outsider (cf. Smyth, 2005), attachment and
detachment (cf. Lemay-Hebert and Kappler, 2016), self and other (cf. Kinnvall, 2004),
that shapes the role of the interpreters in this performance. This tension is, then, also
reflected in the discussions that the touring of the theatre play triggered in Rwanda,
Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Interestingly, as the director Michael
Lessac emphasised to me (Skype interview, 8 December 2017), the play toured to those
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Film review
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