Miroirs No. 3
In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, whereas each unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way.
The young piano student Laura miraculously survives a serious car accident in the countryside near Berlin and finds refuge in the house of Betty, who witnessed the crash. In the secure shelter of this house, she enters a state of late summer in-betweenness, and finds closeness and tenderness in an apparently humdrum everyday life that consists of gardening, joint meals and visits to the workshop of Betty's husband Richard and her son Max. However, a shared, unspoken pain that unites and affects all of them simmers below this warm surface. References to Maurice Ravel's Miroirs and his piece Une barque sur l'océan run through Christian Petzold's film like a musical leitmotif: a small life raft, constructed of images, sounds and meaningful glances, on which a broken family and a stranger try to find their feet again. Mirrors No. 3 is a quiet, comforting film about loss, love and the fragile art of living on after a catastrophe – masterfully carried by Hans Fromm's late summer images and the performances of Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt and Enno Trebs.
After the film, the journalist Petra Gute will talk to its director Christian Petzold, who also wrote the script, and its producer Anton Kaiser.
