À condition d’avoir une table dans un jardin

Preoccupied with breathing easier, Mr. and Mrs. Parquet moved from Paris to a detached house in the Île-de-France region. They bought a garden table made of solid iroko, a precious wood from the Congo. Years later, a strange phone call brought news of an unexpected visit: the table's terms and conditions of sale stipulated that after ten years, they had to host an inhabitant of the Ituri rainforest for eleven nights and ten days. Darius Wengue, a Mbuti from the Democratic Republic of Congo, arrives in Orgeval.

Author and director Gérard Watkins has created a dramatic and political comedy that is as hard-hitting as it is delicious. The action unfolds in a space sculpted by light that suggests both the interior of the house and the garden, arranged around the tree-table. Inverting the relationship between the Western ethnologist and his field of study, he makes Mbuti the ethnologist and the bourgeois couple the subjects to be studied: polluters, egoists, conscious and unconscious of a distant forest. Darius Wengue knows the tragedy of deforestation. He also knows that the armed conflicts that persist in his country are linked to its mineral wealth, indispensable to the manufacture of our cell phones.

By asking his hosts simple questions about their customs and beliefs, this wounded man becomes the seismograph of what we Westerners have become.