Katzelmacher
- Helga
- Anja DrnovšekMarie
- Željko HrsPaul
- Erich
- Rosie
- Elisabeth
- Bruno
- Franz
- Jorgos
- Translation: Urban Belina, Matej Venier
- Dramaturgy: Saška Rakef
- Music: Bojana Šaljić Podešva
- Set and costume design: Irena Pivka
- Stage movement: Igor Sviderski
- Language consultant: Mateja Dermelj
- Lighting design: Matjaž Brišar
- Sound design in the venue and sound direction: Slivo Zupančič
- Sound director's assistant: Alen Rituper
- Stage managers: Janez Pavlovčič, Gašper Tesner
- Sound engeneer of radio broadcast and head of radio technical team: Matjaž Miklič
- Assistants: Milan Zrimšek, Darja Hlavka Godina
- Radio announcers: Igor Velše, Ivan Lotrič, Barbara Zupan
- Special thanks to: Klarisa Jovanović, Dragan Ocvirk, Maja Klenovšek
In only sixteen years of active creativity, Rainer Werner Fassbinder finished more than forty films, two television series, directed twenty-four performances, four radio plays, and also worked as an actor, playwright, camera operator, designer, editor, producer and theatre manager. Katzelmacher was his first theatre play; he wrote it in 1968 and won the prestigious Gerhart Hauptmann Award. He turned the story into a film script and a year later used it to shoot, in mere nine days, his second feature, which won seven awards at the festival in Manheim-Heidelberg. How does his story speak to us today? Which questions, linked to the psychological, political and economic aspects of the functioning of the society does it open? What is hiding underneath the red carpet? If we offer one of Fassbinder’s answers: “Of the five hundred and fifty marks he gets paid two hundred and twenty. The production grows, the money remains with the state. That’s the trick. And this is for Germany.”
Katzelmacher unfolds three layers of content in front of us, the astonishing actuality/visionariness of this fifty-year-old Fassbinder’s creation, his social motive, which could have been written yesterday (and here), and the playing with a hybrid form of theatre and radio. As the director Alen Jelen approaches all three factors with equal attention and with a legitimate thought of unpretentiousness, he avoids the excessive clamour of political engagement, doesn’t interfere with Fassbinder’s idea (text) concept, because it seems that a newly invented re-interpretation is almost not necessary (dramaturg Saška Rakef).
The visible image doesn’t layer the story with its own attitude to the material, but subtly discloses it. […] In such concept, what stands out are primarily perfected speech interpretations and sparkly acting vignettes in a floating time of collapsing bodies.
Katzelmacher brings us more that we (might) want to accept and (certainly) more than we’d want to see, it places in front of us the mirror of the society in which we live, the part of which we are. The question is, simply, will we concede to such a world without rebelling.
