“Knowing has everything to do with growing. But the knowing of dominant minorities absolutely must not prohibit, most not asphyxiate, must not castrate the growing of the immense dominated majorities.” Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers.
A teenager with light brown skin, short hair and clad in orange coveralls sits slumped at a desk, head held in delicately cupped hands, and sobs. As he cries for his mother in Arabic the grainy image flickers and jerks with a lo-fi intensity that befits surveillance footage. He is alone in the room, having been left by his CSIS and CIA interrogators, fuliginous nameless wraiths who are off camera watching the same footage themselves, waiting for an opportune time to return to the tiny room to continue the psychological warfare they have been conducting on this twice shot, blinded from shrapnel, tortured and imprisoned adolescent.
And we—the audience—are watching with them, sitting tense in our seats, experiencing the intimate proximity of an interior space of intense injustice, pain, suffering, and desperation.