Story
NANA, 38, is the perfect drinker. Her rush is as passionate as a love affair, and she tries to live her life, with all its highs and lows, to the absolute fullest. Until her body gives up on her, and she finds herself hovering on the brink of death. Nana starts saying farewell to her old life. She will have to reinvent herself, if she wants to see her son grow up.
Info
Screenplay: Katharina Held & Igor Heitzmann
Format: feature film, drama
Director: Igor Heitzmann
DOP: Rali Raltchev
Line Producer: Bettina Morlock
Cast
Brigitte Hobmeier et al.
In co-production with De Productie (the Netherlands), screenplay funded by BKM
Director’s note
THE PERFECT DRINKER tells a story about the lustfully orchestrated exercising of an absolute loss of control. At an age in which most people settle for security, Nana does away with all safety nets, risking her entire existence. Through the story of this one possible individual life, the film poses the question how far one must – or should – go to attain absolute personal freedom.
What fascinates me most in the character of Nana, is that she takes from life what she wants, while at the same time juggling the demands of her challenging profession and taking care of her child. Nana is talented, imaginative, unorthodox; a free spirit. Contrary to most famous male artists known for their alcohol excesses, she is not a loner who has dropped out of society. She is very much in touch – and in continuous conflict – with our contemporary society, where people are torn between the dictates of self-realization with its boundless freedom and self-optimisation with all its forced rules of “respectability”.
Together with co-writer Katharina Held, I have designed Nana’s story as a heroic one – of a bold and broken heroine, whose quest is always exciting in its uncompromising restlessness. THE PERFECT DRINKER is a celebration of lust for life and audaciousness, while at the same time reflecting on the price one pays for burning as passionately as our heroine.
Life is too beautiful not to waste it...
Setting
The opera world forming the background to THE PERFECT DRINKER is the ideal arena for the radical emotionality of Nana’s story. A thrilling, mysterious world full of colour, masks and madness in which every emotion is heightened manifold, its song and music penetrating to our very core. In no other world do people love, suffer and die more dramatically. It is this raw intensity of feeling which has always fascinated me about opera, and which, I believe, will not fail to fascinate an audience that has little experience of the opera world. The detailed, unconventional and baroque set designs of our main character express her vision on art and life – to do away with the rational boundaries that prevent us from being in touch with our hidden emotions and fears.
