Opening on 10 July at 7 pm with the artist and Jan Gympel

Curator: Wolfgang Theis

Now nearly 40 films in 40 years, most of which self-financed – producer, director, author, actor and sporadically editor, camera man, sound man, distributor, as well: Lothar Lambert has, since his birth in Berlin in 1944, created a unique oeuvre which has made him one of the most significant and well-known representatives of “underground cinema” in Germany. Cinema about sex and longings, selfrealization and psychic deformations, wishes, the ups and downs of outsiders, rejects or at least those who go basically unnoticed in the urban jungle of (initially only West) Berlin. All of this shown in authentic, harrowing, tragicomic ways, usually unscripted and featuring friends and other non-professional actors, but then also personalities such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ingrid Caven, Norman Jewison, Jim Jarmusch and René Koch.

At the Berlinale, Lothar Lambert has become a regular: 17 of his works have screened there. Retrospectives have aired repeatedly on television, and one was dedicated to him at the Festival of Festivals in Toronto in 1982. Lambert’s 1974 drama “1 Berlin-Harlem” has entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A painter and trained journalist, who spent decades publishing freelance with nearly every Berlin newspaper, the filmmaker has turned increasingly to documentary – although he sticks as little to the conventions of this genre as he does to those of features.

Documentary or not, nearly all of his works are by now considered documents of their zeitgeist and thus also history-They are the works of a man who never saw himself as a gay director, but rather as a gay man who makes films – in which questions of sexual and gender identity frequently played roles. And the answers to these questions were never dogmatic: Every man and every woman should just do whatever he or she feels like doing, dress, give, love and live at his or her own discretion. Lothar Lambert’s cinema is a plea for freedom, tolerance and all that is “queer”.

On 24 July, Lothar Lambert is celebrating his 70 birthday in the Brotfabrik, where he will show his newest film. At the request of the director, the German Cinematheque Foundation is presenting the film WAS SIE NIE ÜBER FRAUEN WISSEN WOLLTEN (What You Never Wanted to Know about Women) in the Arsenal on 28 July. Lambert’s films are also running at the Bundesplatzkino.

The Schwules Museum* will offer tours with curator Wolfgang Theis every Wednesday at 6 pm for the duration of the exhibition, as well as events with Jan Gympel and Lothar Lambert.