Katzelmacher

Synopsis

Jorgos is a young Greek guest worker in Germany, known pejoratively as a ‘Katzelmacher’, Bavarian slang for ‘cat screwer’, referring to the supposed sexual habits of foreigners. He rents a room in Elisabeth's house in the Munich suburbs. She and Peter hang out with a group of disaffected and bored young people who resent Jorgos and beat him up when he dates a German girl.

"Katzelmacher was shot over a mere nine days in August 1969, and was subsequently described by Fassbinder as the first of his “bourgeois” films – apparently because its own minimal story about lower-middle-class characters when they aren’t working seems conceived in relation to life and not other movies. It premiered at the Mannheim Film Festival in October, where it received no less than seven prizes, and one can conclude, paradoxically, that it remains Fassbinder’s most avant-garde film as well as one of his most commercial." – Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Example of Katzelmacher