-„THE GREAT FORTUNE“
grand prize of Beldocs ! international competition award beldocs 2016 !

Presse:
….Perhaps the festival’s most unexpected and therefore fitting surprise was The Great Fortune by Kirsten Burger, Mikko Gaestel and Johannes Muller. The film centers around a flamboyant, obnoxious and ego-maniacally self-obsessed actor which the directors follow in his luxurious daily routine. Fancy restaurants, exclusive spas and massage parlors, a driver whose name he can’t even pronounce, Mirco Kuball has it all. He is also affected by the down syndrome, but unlike the vast majority (totality?) of disabled people that appear in front of a camera the audience is not asked to pity him or feel sorry for his condition. On the contrary, Mr. Kuball is as dislikable and annoying as any other ostentatious showbiz prima donna, and by denying him the compulsory empathy that disabled people are hypocritically granted on screen (but not in society), the directors do away with the polite barriers that divide “disabled” from “normal” people. A remarkable achievement indeed. Beldocs too, very much like this film, turns expectations upside down, catches its audiences off guard and artlessly blends with the non-aligned charm of a city that exudes a raw, quasi-sexual energy from every corner. There is no reason why the love of cinema and that for life should be kept separate. After all, you know a festival is successful when the time spent in a movie theatre is as pleasurable and fruitful as the one you spend with the people around you and the place you find yourself in. (Festival BELDOCS, Belgrade, Serbia, 2016)

„THE GREAT FORTUNE“:
Ultra-wealthy, roguish, cultivated, affected, annoying, trisomic: meet Mirco Kuball. The heir to a large fortune, he spends his days in the lap of luxury, feasting on an endless parade of fine foods, enjoying massages, wearing bespoke clothes, succumbing to his every whim. To break out of his indolent life, he also has artistic ambitions, which he fulfills by working as a theatre extra. The Great Fortune is a funny yet serious look at an eccentric and capricious man who is the pompous star of his own life. His bizarre and pedantic pronouncements for the camera gradually give way to more intimate thoughts, revealing a complex and fragile man who uses wealth to make up for what nature has not given him. (RIDM’s 2016 official selection, Montreal International Documentary Festival)

Description:

“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.”
“What am I going to do with my life? You are alone. All alone. That’s important. It can’t go on like this. Well, that’s the way it is. It will go on.“ // “The perfect human – that’s me. People see me as something special. I’m friendly. I have a special magic. I’m looking forward to something that holds me. Perfect humans do one thing: they care for me. All of hem.“ // “I imagine (…) a prince will come along and say: ‚Darling, come to me!’. But that’s just wishful thinking. Nothing else. “ // “Well, but in the end everybody has to take care of themselves.“ // “Hail, Manitou!“
by Lennart Wolff