Das Gewicht der Ameisen

In the organizer's words:

"Good afternoon. This is your director speaking. You can stop booing me, I don't like you either. As you know, last year we made it into the top 10 worst schools in the country. In other words, we're all losers." What to do when the principal is already resigned? Proactively plan the revolution or rather create a salutary distraction with cute cat videos?

Jeanne is angry, and really angry. She has no money, no voting rights and no job. Well, she's only fourteen years old and a schoolgirl, but she still wants to be taken seriously. False promises from advertising, the media, adults and even more expectations lurk everywhere. Co-determination - no chance. Olivier is also depressed because the climate crisis is imminent and nobody has any solutions. But people don't want to hear about that any more than they want to hear about the encyclopaedia of useless knowledge that he has been diligently reading ("Snails have an average of 14,000 teeth. Fascinating, isn't it?"). One thing is clear to both of them: something has to change! After all, even doing nothing has consequences. So the election for the student council comes at just the right time. While Jeanne wants to riot against the system, Olivier tries the empathetic way. In the election campaign, it's a case of pent-up frustration versus optimism versus ... free pizza from Mike's parents. Should the two of them join forces to really achieve something?

David Paquet lives in Montreal and writes plays and radio plays. In 2022, he won the Governor General's Award for French-language drama, Canada's most important literary prize, with The Weight of the Ants. Paquet attempts to call for resistance and protest in a very comical to bizarre way, to shout something against the ignorance and apathy of the masses. In doing so, he scrutinizes power relations and points out in a biting way both the lack of orientation that young people are often confronted with and the lack of a say. He has already been invited to the Primeurs Festival in Saarbrücken several times with his plays.