Hate Radio

Rwanda, 1994. A radio broadcast kindles the most brutal genocide since the end of the Cold War as Rwandan society is swept away by the idea of eradicating a minority in the name of peace and freedom. Twenty years on, a dramatist of the first rank set out to find out what really happened; now, he is staging a riveting production-documentary which seeks to explain the incomprehensible.

The award-winning "Hate Radio" from the ground-breaking writer and director, Milo Rau, has traveled from the Avignon Festival and the Theatertreffen, Berlin, to more than fifteen countries. The work examines the role played by Rwanda’s RTML (Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) during the genocide against the Tutsis in Ruanda.

Can words kill? Can a radio broadcast fuel massacres? How susceptible are we to media manipulation?

"Hate Radio" is a reconstruction of an RTLM broadcast and based on actual events. Milo Rau, a champion of the theater of re-enactment, uses eyewitness accounts, studies, reports and archive material in his work. The production sheds light on the cynical machinations of the station’s journalists, the creators of a monstrous factory whose skillful racist propaganda would lay the foundations for the genocide in an advertising campaign that ran for months before the slaughter.

Professional actors who experienced the events at first hand play the radio presenters and speak into microphones; the audience, who take the place of their listeners, don earphones; a theater of the real is set to begin.