Rainer Werner Fassbinder's posthumous film brings together several of the themes that ran through his entire filmography: the revision of history, melodrama, the body and desire, among others. Based on the novel by Jean Genet, Querelle stands as an erotic utopia: a world where the characters freely inhabit their identities. Georges Querelle, the main character, is a sailor with an irresistible attraction that seduces everyone who meets him. After the arrival of his ship in a port city, the young sailor embarks on an odyssey of sexual awakening that will lead him down unexpected paths. The baroque sets and the camp theatricality of its staging place Querelle between the modern and the contemporary. A hinge play between two eras.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
A leading director of the New German Cinema, he directed film, theatre and television, in addition to working as an actor, producer, writer, cinematographer and editor in countless works. He was born in Bad Wörishofen (Germany) in 1945 and died at the age of 37 in Munich, after directing more than forty films in just thirteen years. He debuted in 1969 with ‘Love is Colder than Death’, the first of his eight appearances at the Berlin Festival, where he won the Golden Bear in 1982 for ‘Veronika Voss’. At Cannes he won the Ecumenical Jury Prize and the Fipresci award thanks to ‘Ali: Fear Eats the Soul’, and at Seminci he competed with ‘Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven’ (1975) and ‘Germany in Autumn’ (1978). His vast legacy includes works such as ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’ (1972), his first international success; ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’ (1980, awarded in Venice), or ‘The Marriage of Maria Braun’ (1979), among other gems.