A Line in the Sand
Description
In the autumn of 1990, during Operation Desert Storm, two young men, one a troubled Canadian soldier, the other a teenage Palestinian black-marketeer, meet in the scorched Qatari desert. Breaching the divide of a profound cultural misunderstanding and against a backdrop of massive global conflict, these two become unlikely and secret friends. This tenuous friendship is severed by the torture and murder of the 16-year-old Palestinian inside the Canadian base-an act to which the Canadian soldier was at least a witness and perhaps a willing participant.
Weaving poetic drama with myriad documentary sources, A Line in the Sand rips the benevolent mask off recent western peacekeeping operations and challenges Canada's long treasured national mythology that it is a nation of quiet diplomats. It asks us to imagine how horrors like these could be perpetrated with our money, in our name and by people much like us.
Cast of 3 to 5 men
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Person
Guillermo Verdecchia is a writer of drama and fiction as well as a director, dramaturge, translator, and actor. He received the Governor-General's Award for Drama for his play Fronteras Americanas and is a four-time winner of the Chalmers Canadian Play Award. His work includes the critically acclaimed Feast, The Art of Building a Bunker (with Adam Lazarus), the Governor-General shortlisted Noam Chomsky Lectures (with Daniel Brooks), the Seattle Times' Footlight Award-winning Adventures of Ali & Ali (with Marcus Youssef and Camyar Chai), A Line in the Sand (with Marcus Youssef), bloom, and Another Country. His work has been recorded, anthologized, translated into Spanish and Italian, produced in Europe and the US, and is studied in Latin America, Australia, Europe, and North America.
He lives in Toronto with Tamsin Kelsey, his partner of many years, and their two children.