MiniMe

Ten Lessons in Submission

Home is not a safe place for the ten-year-old Mini. Her family resembles a porous structure of entangled desires, tactics and fast Wi-Fi. A toxic triangle that ultimately won’t protect but possess her. While it doesn’t make her any stronger, it intensifies the brutality of a competitive society striving for optimisation, bringing it right into the family’s living room. And it hits the most vulnerable of them all – the child and her right to an open future.

“For me, ’MiniMe’ is a phenomenon illustrating a certain power structure. It is, however, not possible for somebody to grow into the exact mini version of somebody else. In our film Pieces of A Woman, we explored the issue of ‘Who owns the female body?’ Here, I wanted to ask: Who owns the next generation? The family history described serves as a model for something bigger, something we need to reflect upon. Depriving a child of its childhood, of being able to just be a child is, in my view, one of the most serious abuses by parents or societies or policy-makers. I find it interesting that the boundaries are not at all clear. We all feel entitled to intrude the private sphere of the other, to criticise and label each other all the time. A child who lives in a dysfunctional family in which boundaries are blurred and trespassed, won’t be protected. Instead, it is open to varying perspectives from the outside. I believe that the more we allow ourselves to be labelled by algorithms, the more we will lose our sense of who we could be or become.” (Kata Wéber)

The author Kata Wéber and director Kornél Mundruczó have established a close collaboration in various theatre and film projects, among them co-productions with European theatres and festivals for Mundruczó’s Hungary-based free theatre collective Proton-Theater (Dementia, Imitation of Life, Evolution). Film collaborations include Underdog (2014) and the English-language feature film Pieces of a Woman (2020), which attracted international attention at the Venice film fest and Toronto International Film Festival, and is also listed on Netflix. Leading parts are Shia La Beouf and Vanessa Kirby, with the latter nominated for an Oscar in 2021 for her excellent performance. Premiering MiniMe at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg Platz – as part of a series of micro portrayals including Imitation of Life and Pieces of a Woman –, Wéber and Mundruczó present their first collaborative theatre production in Berlin. It’s a piece of dense hyperrealism in which various fictional genres break into the traditional storytelling.

„Cruelty is a drug (…), and it’s all around us”

Tennessee Williams

 

German with English surtitles