La batalla de los ausentes

More than being, they were. Survivors of a war that nobody remembers, in spite of their relentless yet futile attempt to win the battle against oblivion by magnifying those skirmishes, mere ephemera of no interest to anyone. From the final stage of their destinies, these Quixotes who seem to have been disinterred from the trenches of history, ask themselves: Would things have been different if we had been victorious in that long-forgotten war?

Was that the crucial battle or is the decisive one still ahead of us, the battle against death? The satire of power and faith as an act of resistance are the two poles that traverse these characters. Theirs is the desperate struggle for life itself, the battlefield, a tireless fight for the conquest of a destiny.

Zaranda’s three classically trained actors, its hard core, are the army in retreat from this long and arduous battle. Their recognisable language is their bedraggled flag in a world at war against the poetic meaning of existence. Skirmishes, desertions and fronts that open up in their own consciousness. The metaphor of a combat, the beauty of defeat and the triumph of those who never lose sight of the horizon, despite that defeat.

At a time when we have been defeated by pessimism, sadness and despair, La Batalla de los Ausentes raises the sword of light against those dark riders, in a hymn to human dignity and against all those who hide their horizon when the dawn breaks.