Christiane Jatahy
Christiane Jatahy is an author, theatre director and cinematographer. She has a degree in theatre and journalism and a master’s in art and philosophy. Her work has engaged with different fields of art since 2003. In theatre she has written and directed several plays that cross the line between reality and fiction, actor and character, theatre and audio-visual. They are: Studio Apartment, The Absence that Moves us, All Stories are Fiction and Dry Cut. She directed the film The Absence that Moves us, during 13 continuous hours of filming, without cuts, using three hand-held cameras. The material was edited and is now a feature-length film and a cinematographic performance that has been presented at national and international film festivals and which remained in Brazilian box offices for 12 weeks. The film’s raw footage was also shown on three cinema screens for 13 hours in a cinematographic performance at the Parque Lage Art Gallery. In London she directed the project In the Comfort of Your Home, a documentary-video-installation with performances by 30 Brazilian artists in English homes.
She is currently on tour directing Julia, an adaptation of the play Miss Julie, by Strindberg. Julia is a mixture of theatre and live cinema. The play/film was presented at the main European film festivals and was shown at the CentQuatre in 2012. In 2013 she won the Shell Prize for Best Director for this piece.
In 2013, she developed the audiovisual and documentary installation project Utopia.doc, in Paris, Frankfurt and Sao Paulo. In 2014, Espaço Sesc hosted the première of What if They Went to Moscow?, a play and film simultaneously shown in two different spaces, based on The Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov. In 2015, in Brazil, she won the Shell Questão de Critica and APTR prizes for this piece. What if They Went to Moscow? is still touring festivals in Europe and the United States and was in the box office of the Teatro La Colline for three weeks.
In 2016, concluding the trilogy that began with Julia, Christiane Jatahy produced The Walking Forest, a free adaptation of Macbeth, that combines documentary, performance and live cinema. In 2017, at the invitation of the Comédie-Française, she produced the piece The Rules of the Game, based on the film by Jean Renoir, for the Salle Richelieu. The same year, in Germany, she produced the Moving People project, which talks about immigrants, refugees and the current capitalist system, and In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, a play by Bernard-Marie Koltes, at the invitation of the Thalia Theatre. Currently, Christiane Jatahy is an associate artist of the Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe, the CentQuatre and the Théâtre Nâtional Wallonie-Bruxelles.
International festivals which she has participated in include: Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Wiener Festwochen, Zurcher Theater Spektakel, Temps d’Images – CentQuatre Paris, Holland Festival, Venice Biennale, Rotterdam de Keuze Festival, Noordezon Festival, Mousonturm, Hau Hebbel Berlin, La Bâtie – Festival de Genève, Festival Automne en Normandie, Miadi Levi Slovenia, On the Boards – Seattle, Red Cats – Los Angeles, Temporada Alta Girona, Alkantara Festival Lisboa, Centro Dramático Nacional – Madrid, Thalia Theater – Hamburg, Tempo Festival, Cena Contemporânea Brasília, Fiac Salvador, Porto Alegre em Cena, MIT São Paulo.