24/01/2024 - Michael Karrer’s debut feature film confronts us with a reality which we’re not able to see, overwhelmed as we are by the frenzy of everyday life

Presented in a world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and selected for the Solothurn Film Festival where it’s competing in the Visions section, Burning Fire by young Zurich-born director Michael Karrer, who trained at the Zurich University of the Arts (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste), deconstructs reality and offers up a new poetic and clinical version, one which is ethereal yet imbued with a ceremonial-toned gravity.

Alongside a river, between buildings akin to mythological animals, or in the garden of a country house, people come together for the day (and the evening). The characters in Burning Fire play, laugh, chat, get drunk and gradually reveal their secrets. Whether we’re dealing with an adolescent grappling with an existential crisis which they’re struggling to keep under tabs, an animated discussion between two youngsters about a subject unknown to the audience, or children “fighting”, everyday micro-dramas become “incandescent moments”. As the day yields to night and then to dawn, each of these characters goes their separate ways, as if the magic has vanished; as if the sunlight, still far off, but there, nonetheless, were capable of killing dreams and utopias.

Michael Karrer’s debut feature film speaks of the dynamics, states of mind, emotions and tensions which inhabit different groups. A eulogy of everyday life, of a seemingly banal day transformed into an initiatory journey, Burning Fire forces us to look at reality as we never have before. Obliged to follow the film’s purposefully slow pace, the audience finds itself confronted with details and subtle states of mind which might otherwise pass unnoticed. A kind of filmic meditation characterised by a succession of long sequence shots, Burning Fire lays down its own rules. A herd of teenagers head towards the banks of a river where they’ll spend the day and the night, swimming, drinking and trying to change the world in any way that they can; a group of young adults find themselves in a house in the country, to eat, chat and relive the past; and a group of children play between buildings in a suburban neighbourhood, a mysterious place which they know like the back of their hands. These are the heroes and heroines of this film in which boredom, too, is transformed into poetry.

As light as childhood but likewise inhabited by a kind of saudade reminiscent of masterpieces from Portuguese cinema, like The Green Years by Paulo Rocha, Burning Fire is a hymn to group dynamics and to the complex nature of human relations. Nothing really happens in this movie - overwhelmingly composed of sequence shots which prevent us from accessing the protagonists’ emotions - but essentially this inertia is the beating heart of the film. What happens isn’t really important, because beauty and poetry can be found in the present, in small, everyday gestures, and in words which burn like fire.

Burning Fire is produced by Sabotage Filmkollektiv and Zürcher Hochschule der Künste ZHdK and is sold worldwide by Portugal’s Kino Rebelde.

(Translated from Italian)