Three Georgians looking for work find what they are looking for in an ostentatious Prussian city palace: They are to decorate it for one of those Berlin Republic evening events where people with money pretend to have taste. And so they set about cleaning the rooms while, among other things, the landlord stalks through the walls like Nosferatu on stimulants, subalterns make themselves important and all sorts of other things take their rather less good course ...
Julian Radlmaier comes from the same dffb context as Max Linz and also makes a related but very different kind of cinema. A Proletarian Winter's Tale has a lot to do with Brecht and his folk play concept, recalling both the anarchistic humor of Liesl Karlstadt and Karl Valentin as well as the pictorial-abstract dream called Machorka-Muff (1962), which stands at the beginning of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's oeuvre. It is cheerful, proudly dialectical, gnarly and full of unexpected capers. And at the center of it all: a trio that collectively looks as melancholy and defiant as if it had sprung from an early Kaurismäki work.
