Mercury

Freddie Mercury, front man of the legendary British rock band Queen, spent a lot of time in Munich from 1979 to 1985. He lived in several apartments here, forged close friendships and recorded his first solo album. What drew him to the Isar? Love, the wild nightlife and the many meeting points of the city’s gay community? The Musicland Studios of Giorgio Moroder and their pioneering innovations in electronic music? Or did he simply want to avoid the rigid British tax laws?

The Polish director Michaƚ Borczuch together with the ensemble launches an enquiry into the star’s legacy and the freedoms that he discovered in between the Glockenbachviertel and the Arabella Hochhaus. What remains now of the world through which this spirit of the planet Mercury – the smallest and fastest in the solar system – moved then?

Freddie Mercury, who himself made a diligent effort to preserve his iconographic presence for posterity, remains a figure full of contradictions: renowned as a party animal and exalted king of the stage, he is often described as introverted in private. While he never outed himself publicly, he displayed many of the trappings of his homosexuality in his performances. Many who crossed his path fell victim, as he did, to the AIDS epidemic; many venues of the subculture to gentrification. A portrait of his life in Munich is inevitably also a portrait of a bygone age.

Michaƚ Borczuch, who examined the Scholl siblings and their legacy in the present in 2021 in «Es waren ihrer sechs» (Six of Them), now returns to the Residenztheater to again draw connections between then and now, between documentary and fiction.