Bruno S. – Estrangement is death.

Documentary, Germany, 2002, 60 min., German with English subtitles

Born in Berlin in 1932, Bruno S. had spent his childhood and youth in orphanages, psychiatric institutions and asylums for the homeless.
His performance of Kaspar Hauser in Werner Herzog’s film THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER (1975) seemed to have helped him break out of his isolation and shake off his reputation as a rather derided fringe figure. Bruno S. was also cast in the leading role of Herzog’s next film STROSZEK, it was the filmmakers declared intention to make the film a monument to Bruno.
Bruno S. however regards this part of the past as a bitter, thus closed chapter. “They sought him and used him. Bruno is just a disposable article”, he says, as his short period of fame was followed by a lifetime of loneliness. The distance he tries to find by talking of himself in the third person seems to enable him to view from the outside the many wounds his soul has sustained over the years.

Miron Zownir’s documentary shows how Bruno S. lives. The film does not seek to portrait him as a victim of institutions and prejudice, rather as someone who, in spite of all manner of disadvantages and discrimination, has managed to find his way in life on his own. In an attempt to rebel against the injustice he has encountered, Bruno S. paints and plays music, being one of the last Berlin backyard musicians…

produced by Virus Films and Icon Film