2026 TAF: Wajdi Mouawad "Littoral"

When tidings of his father’s passing cross the sea to find him through the phone in dawn’s grey light, Wilfrid commits to an improbable journey. To a father who was a mere phantom in life, he offers a final, impulsive vow: to return the body to the soil of its origin.

Yet, landfall reveals a homeland erased. Here, death has lost its ritual: the graveyards are full, and the earth is a minefield of forgotten burials. An unclaimed body is an impossibility. Shunned by those who survived, Wilfrid is left to wander a broken map, shoulder-to-shoulder with the deepening scent and weight of a father who cannot be buried.

En route, he encounters a cadre of youths orphaned by the same silence—Simone, Amée, Sabe, Massi, and Joséphine—each the custodian of an unspoken trauma. Bound by a shared vacuum of lineage, they embark on a collective pilgrimage toward the sea, taking turns to carry the body that belongs to no one and everyone.

A lonely rite of passage dissolves into a shared exodus. Searching for a place where a ghost might rest, they confront a stark, existential silence: when the dead are denied a grave and the past is but a trail of debris, how can the living stitch together a map of the heart?

The world of Littoral is built upon a skeletal stage: tape delineates the maps of the mind, and physical bodies on stage construct the geography. Here, poetic breath and sonorous depth carry the gravity of all things. In the friction between reality and dream, this burial becomes a radical inquiry into the essence of being.

®THIBAUT BARON