Avignon Festival: Ariane Ascaride will play Gisèle Pelicot in a theatrical reconstruction of the "Mazan rapes" trial

This unique, four-hour screening will take place at 10 p.m. on Friday. Tickets, donated by the festival, sold out in less than an hour.

A theatrical reenactment of the Pelicot trial is scheduled to take place on Friday, July 18, at the Avignon Festival, reports France Inter. This unique, four-hour screening will take place at 10 p.m. at the Cloître des Carmes in front of 400 people. It will be broadcast live on Facebook Live on the Avignon Festival page, as well as at Avignon's Utopia cinema. On stage, "excerpts from the trial, collected from Gisèle Pelicot's lawyers, the family, legal experts, and journalists ," will be read by the actors. Ariane Ascaride will play the role of the victim of the "Mazan rapes."

The tickets, offered by the Festival, were sold out in less than an hour. Solange, a festival-goer, waited nearly four hours at the ticket office to secure a seat. " Avignon vibrated during the trial; it's something that will change both for women and men, and bringing an artistic dimension to it allows for a different kind of transmission ," she confided to the France Inter journalist present on site.

The show, proposed by Swiss director Milo Rau and performed with the agreement of Gisèle Pelicot, will feature 50 actors who will reenact the trial in the form of a reading. " We are in contact with her and that's one of the first things we did, to make sure that she supported the project and that she saw meaning in it, that's why we're doing it too ," explains playwright Servane Dècle, who reenacted the four-month trial.

The goal is to " continue to propose that shame change sides ," declared the festival's director, Tiago Rodrigues, on France Inter on July 3. " What we want to do is continue Gisèle Pelicot's gesture, who made her trial public, so that the court, in a certain way, becomes a theater that leads to social transformation ," he continued.

The "Mazan rape trial," named after the commune in Vaucluse where the Pelicot couple lived, left its mark on French and international public opinion. A symbol of chemical submission, it saw 50 defendants parade in court . All were sentenced to terms ranging from 3 years in prison to 20 years in prison for Gisèle Pelicot's ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, who was found guilty of drugging, raping, and having his wife raped by at least 50 men for years at their home in Mazan.