Red - The Sorrows of Belgium III: Holy War

On Tuesday 22 March 2016, Belgium became a victim of large scale terrorism. Suicide bombers set off two bombs at Zaventem airport, and there was also an explosion in the Brussels metro. The attacks left 35 dead and 340 injured. The perpetrators were returning Syrian fighters from the terror group IS. They used nail bombs to make as many victims as possible. The terrorists were linked to the Paris attacks of November 2015. 'Our country is facing a severe test,' Prime Minister Charles Michel said. In sympathy, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and the Palace on Dam Square in Amsterdam were temporarily draped in the Belgian tricolour.

The same tricolour marks the chapters in The Sorrows Of Belgium, the theatre trilogy in which Luk Perceval zooms in on the darkest pages of Belgian history. In Black, the story is told of the exploitation of Congo under Leopold II. Collaboration with the German occupiers was the central theme in Yellow. With each band of the flag, Belgian history came closer to the present, with Red, the chapter on the attacks of 22 March, as the conclusion. Each time, this history forms the starting point of a theatrical whirlwind that transcends national borders and generations, propelled by live music. 
 
All storylines in Red swirl around the search of Hussein, a confused Iraqi man trying to build a new life in Brussels. According to the police, his son is involved in a terrorist network and fled with other terrorists during a police raid. Besides being a search for a lost son, Red is an attempt to come to grips with a traumatic history in a shattered city. Is the forever war, as American journalist Dexter Filkins called the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, still comprehensible? How do the tentacles of this war affect our capital? And what if the lives that intersect in this city have to go around wounds that cannot be healed?