Miriam Goldschmidt

One of the great masterpieces of world literature comes to vivid life in an elaborate production from acclaimed theater and film innovator Peter Brook. This collection of ancient Sanskrit stories (composed into the longest book ever written) comprises a series of enlightened fables at the heart of countless beliefs, legends, and teachings; indeed, its very title means "the great story of mankind." Brook and writer Jean-Claude Carriere worked for eight years to develop this epic concerning two sides of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, whose struggle leads to a fascinating voyage of emotions, passion and vision of glory. Briefly, the Mahabharata is a tale of two rival sets of brothers, cousins to eachother, each born into royalty and with divinely guided paths in life. The result, however, is a great war, death, destruction - a vast epic.

Nearing the end of a long and successful stage career, Miriam Goldschmidt finds her prowess as an actress increasingly on the wane. She struggles to memorize her lines and as her last project with lifelong collaborator, the legendary director Peter Brook, threatens to fall apart, Miriam looks back. Referencing Brook’s ground-breaking book «The Empty Space», she uses an empty rehearsal room in Berlin to invoke her archetypal life journey that took an orphaned black child from post-war Germany to the world’s biggest stages. We «Call Her Miriam» is a bewitching and moving portrait of a great artist living between dream and reality, truth and fction and life and death.

The Mahabharata is a 1989 film version of the Indian epic based on the history of India, Mahabharata directed by Peter Brook. Brook's original 1985 stage play was 9 hours long, and toured around the world for four years. In 1989, it was reduced to under 6 hours for television. Later it was also reduced to about 3 hours for theatrical and DVD release. The screenplay was the result of eight years' work by Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne. For the casting an international selection of actors was intentionally chosen, to show that the nature of the Indian epic is the story of all humanity.