François Cervantes was invited by Jean-Louis Heckel in 2009 to direct a series of writing workshops with the 8th class of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette (ENSAM, Charleville-Mézières) during two years . In those workshops, the play Attends-moi was created. Cervantes then rewrote and adapted it for shadow theatre. This “road-movie”, as the author describes it, is an initiatory trip that tackles the difficulty for students to leave their country to study what they are passionate about – he inserted biographical elements for some of them, for example their experience with grief.

The horse was represented by a life-sized puppet, and the dead characters appeared in the form of bunraku puppets: the living characters were represented with shadows most of the time.

The play was made for a show performed at the end of the student’s second year. It was staged again as part of the Festival Mondial de Théâtres de Marionnettes (World Festival of Puppet Theatres) in 2010, and was also played in Bialystok and Saint Petersburg.

Whilst she is walking on a beach, Caroline, a puppeteer, tells Filip the story of how she met him twenty years ago. The action of the play goes back to that time, when she was a student and was attending her last drawing class. The teacher gives them a horse, which suddenly bursts in the classroom. Sacha learns that her father is dying. Caroline offers to go with her and so she can say her last goodbye. They drive there with Raphaël, whose girlfriend Marie lives close to their final destination. When they arrive at Marie’s house, Raphaël learns that Marie has been cheating on him with his brother. He still decides to stay with her. Caroline and Sasha leave and arrive in the holiday cottage of one of their classmates. There, Caroline meets Filip. They share a night of love, but at dawn, he is gone. Caroline and Sasha continue their journey where they witness an accident, and they arrive in the village where Sasha’s father lives. Sasha goes to join him whilst Caroline walks along the little streets and meets the villagers. Sasha comes back and announces that her father died. She’s holding a picture of herself when she was a child, and starts talking to the picture and telling it about her passion for puppets. The next day, Sasha and Caroline attend the funeral, and then take a plane to go back home.