Fräulein Berlin

Lothar Lambert is celebrating his 80th birthday in July. In 1982, the Toronto Festival of Festivals dedicated a retrospective to him after he had become known as an underground filmmaker in the 1970s. He took advantage of the invitation and trip to shoot his next film - improvised as usual, with the simplest of means and resulting in a rough aesthetic as well as a (partly self-ironic) mixture of reality and fiction: his regular lead at the time, Ulrike S., plays a woman struggling with the fact that she's primarily known for her revealing appearances with a West Berlin underground filmmaker and receives no other offers. So, she tries her luck in Toronto and New York.
Topical events such as the short-term ban on the screening of Lambert's film 1 Berlin-Harlem in Toronto were incorporated into FRÄULEIN BERLIN. And various fellow directors agreed to appear in front of the camera: from Norman Jewison to Bette Gordon and Jim Jarmusch to Helke Sander. The film premiered at the 1984 Berlinale. (Jan Gympel)