Katzelmacher

They are stuck in the provinces and want to leave. They can’t live with or without each other. They eye each other and tear each other apart. Their boredom, envy and money worries feed their prejudices. Until their aggression is unleashed on Jorgos, who came to Bavaria from Greece as a guest worker. In “Katzelmacher”, Fassbinder portrayed the social and cultural struggles of a suburban neighborhood in Bavaria at the end of the 1960s.

In his productions, Emre Akal creates associative artificial worlds together with the artist duo Mehmet & Kazim, in which analog and digital means blur into an illusion of their own. He also places “Katzelmacher” in such a nightmarish setting and traces the mechanisms of a disparate and racist society and its revenants in the present and future.
People who feel humiliated humiliate others in order to elevate themselves - what happens when this dynamic takes on a life of its own and penetrates through supposedly protective walls into the common spaces, into the most private rooms?

With Fassbinder’s “Katzelmacher” behind him and with a specially written epilogue, Emre Akal takes a hesitant look at our current society.

“The fact that the themes of ‘Katzelmacher’ are so timeless shows how important it is to keep renegotiating them. Every generation is confronted with its own versions of these social struggles. The question is: are we capable of creating something new with old tools?”
- Emre Akal, director