De A à X

A for Aida, X for Xavier. He is in prison, serving a life sentence; she carries on her daily life as a pharmacist and writes to him. A one-way correspondence that is transformed into a diary, as Xavier has got into the habit of jotting down, on the back of Aida's letters, his thoughts on his imprisonment, his earlier life, on what his engagement was. We guess that he has been locked up for political reasons, undoubtedly for terrorist acts. From A to X is all these letters “miraculously” discovered by John Berger, certain of which had never been sent. In this epistolary exchange, no country is clearly named, no revolutionary movement precisely identified. So the universality of the subject, of what is revealed to be a novel of a love that clears every obstacle, is established. Through Aida's words, Xavier re-enters the outside world and escapes the walls that surround him. From A to X is a vibrant tribute to the strength of these words that, outside cell 73 in which the prisoner pays the price of his political convictions, an unalienable wind of freedom blows. For this reading in the Cour d'honneur of the Popes' Palace, Juliette Binoche will be the voice of this woman in love and Simon McBurney that of the prisoner who does not disown his battles. The author himself, John Berger, will take charge of this text's prologue, in which the ferocious criticism of a totalitarian system vies with inflamed statements, in which politics and love are entwined for eternity. JFP

translation Katya Berger

with John Berger, Juliette Binoche, Simon McBurney

production Festival d'Avignon with France Culture
with the support of the British Council