Epic movie

If you found The Lord Of The Rings a bit long, be warned: Berlin Alexanderplatz may not be the film for you.

Queer filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s ambitious opus clocks in at a bum-numbing 893 minutes.

While more commonly screened as a serialised television series, the 1980 work is cinematically forged, and unfolds as one great story arc.

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the Goethe Institute will be screening the epic film twice this November -” firstly over five consecutive nights, and then again (for the real Fassbinder nuts) over one intense weekend.

Fassbinder’s films often deal with dark characters on the wrong side of the law, and Berlin is no exception. Fresh out of jail and trying to go straight, lead character Franz finds 1920s Berlin teeming with temptations and betrayal.

This dramatic panorama of a decadent Weimar Republic lurching toward the Third Reich is littered with broken lives lifted from the pages of Alfred Döblin’s celebrated novel and made flesh by a who’s who of German Cinema actors.