What’s up? Lothar Lambert doesn’t want fairy tales or crime novels.
Photo: Jan Gympel
This Friday, Berlin film director Lothar Lambert will receive the Special Teddy Award at the Volksbühne as part of the Berlinale – for his life’s work. The prize for queer cinema has existed since 1987, and Lambert has been making films since the early 1970s: completely autonomously, outside of funding and television programs, with humor, madness and lots of surprises, because his actors are almost all amateur actors or semi-professionals . They want to be seen, and he wants to show them – first in feature films that he thought up (“The Nightmare Woman”, “Fucking City”, “You Elvis, I Monroe”, “Drama in Blonde”), and then also in documentaries about his actors (“Kiss the camera!”, “As Showtime goes by,” “All my stand-up men,” “Erika, my superstar”). Last fall, “Supersharp in places” was his 41st film.
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Lambert started at a time when Rosa von Praunheim still had to issue the slogan: “It’s not the homosexual who is perverted, but the situation in which he lives.” Others founded action groups, and he made films in which he let it rip. Because with him everything was in the mix: gays, lesbians, straights, migrants, commoners, prolos crashed into each other in different constellations and situations; there were casual, uptight, confident, shy and flirtatious, the whole palette.
These weren’t art collages or theses, but real films with breathtaking stories and feelings. It was always about fears, longings and attempts at liberation, which could be funny or catastrophic or both. With lots of jokes about family as such and psychology as a profession. The Lambert films often seem as if you were looking directly into your neighbors’ living room.
“Well, what makes you tick or click or, as they say, move?” asks Lothar Lambert. »That’s sexuality, those are the existential problems, the interpersonal stories. What else is there? Unless you’re making a fairy tale or a crime thriller.« Shot in the everyday, cheap and clever: Lambert partially integrates his old films into his new ones, thereby ensuring a future for his failed projects, because he is very economical and ecological. Before he throws something away, he waits for a new idea that won’t change everything, but definitely a lot!
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