Skip to schedule and film credits
By turns hilarious, moving and ravishing, Werner Schroeter's prize-winning first feature is an epic opus of the director's obsessions: opera and death, high culture and low kitsch, religious suffering, homosexual passion and the sensual attraction of the South.
"Earth-shattering" (Chuck Stephens, Film Comment). If there ever were a film to prove, as the forlorn Carla Aulaulu repeatedly assures us in this, Schroeter's prize-winning first feature, "Life is very precious, even right now!," the resplendent Eika Katappa is it. Recently restored to glowing loveliness by the Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam, Eika Katappa features two of Schroeter's favourite actresses, Aulaulu and Magdalena Montezuma, capering through a bizarre array of characters taken from opera (Rigoletto), mythology (Kriemhild), and the Bible (a Jesus who seems to wonder if he is also St. Sebastian), while Elvis Presley and bel canto arias mix it up on the soundtrack. A grand ritual of effrontery and an epic opus of Schroeter's obsessions — opera and death, German Romanticism and low kitsch, religious suffering, homosexual passion, and the sensual attraction of the South — Eika Katappa is by turns hilarious, moving, and ravishing. "This two-and-a-half hour funkfest is some kind of great movie" (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice).
This film will not have English subtitles. However, as the film is composed mostly of music rather than dialogue, subtitles are not required. Please note the film has always screened without subtitles as it was Schroeter's artistic choice for the film to show this way.