No one in Germany can more justifiably call himself an independent filmmaker than Lothar Lambert: 41 films to date since 1971, almost all financed out of his own pocket, as producer, director, screenwriter, actor and, time and again, as editor, cameraman, sound man and distributor.

Cinema about sex and longings, self-realization and psychological deformities, desires, the weal and woe of the little-noticed in the (initially only West) Berlin urban jungle. And it is as authentic, shocking and tragicomic as you rarely find in this country.

Because they were unusually weird and "dirty" in terms of content and form - especially for the well-behaved German standards - Lambert's works were quickly classified as "underground" in the seventies. And have recently been increasingly ignored by critics and film historians.

Having long since become documents of the zeitgeist and thus of contemporary history, it is long overdue to (re)discover these works.

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