Women Cinemakers meets
Kirsten Burger Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
“It will be … that the music is very quiet. Quiet music. So that you’re able to leave. Grief. Crying. Pain. The pain is stuck somewhere in you. Within me.“ // “When I’ll be dead I will have a red casket. I will put on my Indian chief costume and enjoy death. // “I will have a red casket when I’ll die. With silk and everything. Very soft. (…) I will lie cozily in that casket, all cozy and cuddly. Everyone will take care of me, wash me. And then they’ll lower the casket. But I’m still alive. And my house belongs to me.“ These are the words of Mirco Kuball, the protagonist of “The Great Fortune“, a film by Kirsten Burger, Mikko Gaestel and Johannes Müller. The camera follows Mirco on his way between boutiques, his dentist, oculist, massagist, luxurious cafés and restaurants, etc. Yes, he does live at a huge castle in “Downie Street“ and yes, he happens to fall in love with guys. But, much more important, he’s an artist, which, as he states, “means being an actor. It has a lot of meanings. Artist is when you want to do something. Like acting in theatre. What makes you an actor … an actor wants to say something. Being an actor means: what to do? Something like: I am here. Or I am not here.“ A part of Mirco’s repertoire is the role of Parsifal, the “pure fool“. And, indeed, there is as much ’foolish wisdom’ or ’wise foolishness‘ in what he tells us about his own reality as there is in life itself. Although you wouldn’t want to lump them together, the same as what Mikhail Bakhtin writes about the “fools“ in medieval carnivalesque culture applies to Mr. Kuball, as it seems: “(…) they were not actors playing their parts on a stage (…). (…) they represented a certain form of life, which was real and ideal at the same time. They stood on the borderline between life and art, in a peculiar midzone as it were. They were neither eccentrics nor dolts, neither were they comic actors.”
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Captivating and refined in its balanced and effective storytelling, is a stimulating documentary film by filmmaker Kirsten Burger:
inquiring into the figure of Mirco Kuball, she demonstrates the ability to capture the subtle depths of emotions. This captivating film offers an emotionally charged visual experience, inviting the viewers to unveil the ubiquitous beauty hidden into the details of our everyday life experience: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers