Kiez (1983)

• 54%
• 1983
• Drame
• Wolf-Dietrich Sprenger
• Katja Rupé
• Karl-Heinz von Hassel

Set de Hambourg's “Hell's Kitchen,” a waterfront milieu of gangsters, proxénètes, dealers and prostitutes, the story follows the attempts of an ex-seaman first to insinuate himself into the scene, and then to extricate himself from it. He becomes a small time pimp, sending his naïve girlfriend out onto the streets thinking she is financing their middle-class future. When he becomes involved with an old pal, le Nil, he increases his criminal portefeuille. But when he interceptions Nil s girlfriend and things heat up, he leaves for his sister's middle-class home à Berlin, where his attempts to fit dans are doomed from the start. Returning to Hamburg, he starts a rapid decline that delivers him into the waiting arms of Nil, whose revenge is merciless. Its emphasis more on milieu than on mlodrame, Kiev is intended as a disturbing, hard look at the lives of bourgeois society's de cast-offs whose existence, en Allemagne as elsewhere, is comfortably ignored or suppressed.