The latest film by scandal-film-maker Christoph Schlingensief, Die Spalte (‘The Slit’), is a hysterical orgy of indictments of everything that smells of political correctness. Schlingensief likes to use a farcical idiom borrowed from the cheapest horror and porn films. He has a great feeling for the moment when a situation becomes tasteless and then he tends to go just that little further. In Die Spalte he leads a battalion of German UN soldiers who make a real mess of things in Africa. Cult-star Udo Kier is a raging UN general and the super-chested porn queen Kitten Natividad is his wife: a woman who should be a virgin, but gives him a black baby. The baby is ceremoniously named Jesus, but an accident leaves it maimed into a monster, with a kind of cunt on its forehead as a wound. And more of such distasteful yet original rubbish. Schlingensief shot the film on location in Zimbabwe. While they were shooting, the whole crew was arrested by the secret police on suspicion of making a porn film. The film material had to be smuggled out of Zimbabwe to complete the film. Variety called Schlingensief a ‘German bad-tastemeister’ and predicted: ‘Probably only the most adventurous of fest programmers will find an opening for The Slit‘. Rotterdam is always eager to take on the challenge.
