TEMIS

A middle-class family has spent years building up a family business that has become an important company in the city where they live, making them quite rich. This family-owned business has set a high standard because of its inclusive and non-discriminatory policies in a setting where this kind of approach is lacking. However, this family’s pride and liberal values are threatened when they discover that they have a long-lost sister who was raised in a completely different environment. Enigmatic and one-of-a-kind, she exposes both their prejudices and a type of violence this family believed to be extinct.

Themis - whose name refers to the Greek god of justice and fairness - is a strange, bourgeois drama starring democratic and liberal twenty-first-century citizens. In this play, the cracks start appearing in the fiction with the appearance of barbarians, cyclops, and satyrs. These are savage beings driven out of a democratic state, who prevent any telling of citizen dramas in a country torn apart by social violence, where the democratic model has - paradoxically - become an excellent way to perpetuate and normalize the status of those who are citizens and those who are barbarians.

Themis is the third part of a trilogy that is also made up of Donde Viven los Bárbaros and Tú Amarás. It questions liberal democracies’ ideas of inclusion and empathy, where forced identity politics decide which groups should be invited to take part in a democratic state. What could have been a deep and meaningful story about a middle-class Chilean family with liberal values turns, in Themis, into a nightmare in which the barbarians put an almost unbearable strain on the values that this family considered unshakeable.