The Return

In July 2017, exactly fifty years after its discovery, the sculpture reappeared, now on display in the Greek and Roman galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The next day, a legal case was set in motion for its repatriation. From this starting point, The Return uses trial transcripts and a series of interviews with key witnesses to travel across the fifty years and to address the troubled relationship between antiquities and national identity.

Rayyane Tabet moves in a scenic space, halfway between a courtroom and an anatomical theatre, in which we are both jury and spectators. Starting from the known elements and proceeding with great lucidity, he slowly approaches the dark years at the heart of the story. For Tabet – born in Lebanon in 1983 – it becomes a way to raise questions about traceability, and what it means to protect the past for a state that does not protect its present.