Show 143: A Radiotale of 2 Walls by fran ilich

In “a Radiotale of 2 walls’, a Mexico city girl runs away with her boyfriend towards the North, but is stranded in faraway Tijuana where she explores the possibilties of crossing the border, making a strange friendship with a shady waiter at the trashy Avenida Revolución (the street of perpetual spring break), a woman of Juárez who reappears as a ‘ghost of internet past’. She’s trying to escape from her past life, her family and trying to start anew, but in the process discovers a new border world full of casualties, contradiction and stories. The character discovers slowly that the people whom she tought of as ‘criminals dealing in the border’ are humans, victims of nationalistic socioeconomical agendas, not unlike the people surrounding the drama of the Berlin Wall and the Germany of the Cold War years.

Radio-novela is the immediate antecessor of the latin-american soap opera (telenovela), and even though is a genre based on audio, it hasn’t completely disappeared, even if it’s not as strong as it used to be decades ago. Sagas would last for years, something which to this day, not even telenovelas are able to achieve. But latin american Telenovelas have crossed the borders and oceans not only into eastern europe, africa, and middle east, but into the us and europe, and in the case of Ugly Betty: a half-breed sitcom/telenovela, just the fact that is not a traditional melodrama inadvertently comments the fact of mexicans migrating into the u.s. become something else: a detail that major latin-american entertainment conglomerates haven’t been able to target with their nationalistic and traditional approaches.

This production was comissioned by Diana Mccarty for Berlin Backyard Radio and it’s a serialized fiction paying hommage to Charles Dickens “A tale of two cities’, which was originally published one chapter at a time in english newspapers. Directed by fran ilich, with several actors including Adriana Segura.

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