The Prince Charles Cinema

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The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant
1972 124mins Germany (12) Romance/Drama
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Starring Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Katrin Schaake, Eva Mattes

Petra von Kant is a successful fashion designer – arrogant, caustic, and self-satisfied. She mistreats Marlene (her secretary, maid, and co-designer). Enter Karin, a 23-year-old beauty who wants to be a model. Petra falls in love with Karin and invites her to move in.

Ali : Fear Eats the Soul [Angst essen Seele auf]
1974 92mins Germany (12A) Romance/Drama
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Starring Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin

Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira), a cleaning lady, is lonely in her old age. Her husband died years ago, and her grown children offer little companionship. One night she goes to a bar frequented by Arab immigrants and strikes up a friendship with middle-aged mechanic Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). Their relationship soon develops into something more, and Emmi's family and neighbors criticize their spontaneous marriage. Soon Emmi and Ali are forced to confront their own insecurities about their future.

Fox and His Friends [Faustrecht der Freiheit]
1975 123mins Germany (15) Drama
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Karlheinz Böhm, Peter Chatel, Adrian Hoven

A lottery win leads not to financial and emotional freedom but to social captivity, in this wildly cynical classic about love and exploitation by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Casting himself against type, the director plays a suggestible working-class innocent who lets himself be taken advantage of by his bourgeois new boyfriend and his circle of materialistic friends, leading to the kind of resonant misery that only Fassbinder could create. Fox and His Friends is unsparing social commentary, an amusingly pitiless and groundbreaking if controversial depiction of a gay community in 1970s West Germany.

Chinese Roulette
1976 86mins Germany (15) Drama
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Starring Ulli Lommel, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira, Anna Karina

A husband and wife lie to each other about their weekend travel plans, only to both show up at the family's country house with their lovers.

The Marriage of Maria Braun [Die Ehe der Maria Braun]
1979 120mins Germany (15) Romance/Drama
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Starring Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch, Ivan Desny, Gisela Uhlen, Micahel Ballhaus

Maria (Hanna Schygulla) marries Hermann Braun in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. Alone, Maria puts to use her beauty and ambition in order to find prosperity during Germany’s “economic miracle” of the 1950s. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s biggest international box-office success, The Marriage of Maria Braun is a heartbreaking study of a woman picking herself up from the ruins of her own life, as well as a pointed metaphorical attack on a society determined to forget its past.

The Third Generation
1979 110mins West Germany (15) Comedy/Crime
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Starring Harry Baer, Hark Bohm, Margit Carstensen

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's follow-up to his international breakthrough THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN is a wildly anarchic satire of guerrilla terrorism in which a band of leftist radicals inadvertently become puppets of the West German government, which uses them to justify its authoritarian policies. Taking aim at the entire spectrum of political ideologies, THE THIRD GENERATION stands as one of Fassbinder's most provocative and explosively controversial explorations of power and control.