"Name a subject, no matter how taboo, and Lothar Lambert has probably already been at it, picking it apart and laughing at it as the pieces fall around our ears..." --David Overbey
Lothar Lambert, a prodigy of the Berlin Underground, specializes in no-budget filmmaking: self-financed, improvised, hastily-made feature films costing an average of $5,000 and bringing Lambert a wide audience in Berlin, his own "fucking city." At a recent Toronto Film Festival retrospective, he was called "the poor man's Fassbinder"; but one might also see him as Berlin's Andy Warhol, with films that go beyond (and beneath) melodrama to the gutter side of family life. Fucking City describes a married couple's pathetic, ultimately tragic search for ever new sexual thrills. The husband becomes an amateur pornographic filmmaker, using as his male actors bemused Turks and other Berlin "outsiders" (including an outrageous drag queen, played by Lambert himself). Fucking City is a hard, uncompromising look at sexual and racial exploitation, and contains some graphic sexual imagery. The film was featured in last year's Museum of Modern Art New German Film series.