It’s vast and it’s outrageous and, yes, a lot of sex goes on within its walls, but Berlin’s KitKatClub is first and foremost a safe, communal haven for folk whose nocturnal desires and activities differ radically from those of your average Berliner.
As director Philipp Fussenegger, whose KitKatClub – Kinks of Berlin plays both in Thessaloniki Doc Fest and CPH:DOX, tells Business Doc Europe, the club is neither elusive nor exclusive. It charges a moderate fee for entry, and drinks are a regular price. The main criterion for entry is that you dress outrageously (and the fewer garments the better) and that you are prepared to shock, and be happily shocked in turn.
Of course there are the “solo wankers,” as one character calls them, who turn up to watch and who can be persistently annoying, but the place is patrolled by awareness teams who are charged to snuff out problems at source. What’s more, consent is a core criterion of whatever nefarious activities the clubbers get up to.
In the film we are introduced to a cast of characters who frequent the place (which they call Kitty). Foremost among these is Tim, a drag queen who goes by the stage name of Raven; Simon (aka Thaur), the club’s founder; Oli and Foxy, who dress as master and canine friend; the ostensibly straight S&M couple Vici and Marvin, and female friends Hottie and Elisa.
Elisa tells a very funny story in the film about how a long queue had once formed outside a toilet in the club because two people were having sex inside the cubicle. The club’s staff were incensed by this lapse in manners, determining one member to hammer on the door and shout to the folk inside, “do your fucking inside the club.”
We see some of the revellers during their daytime hours, as well as nocturnally, some taking business calls, owner Thaur making porn vids, Raven meeting an agent, others just hanging around their apartments (although Oli and Foxy tend to remain in character).
“Basically, the process was, I was looking for people who might be interested in being in a documentary about the club, which was not so easy,” Fussenegger confides to BDE. “First of all, they have two sides. They have the side in the normal world, and they have their persona in the night. And most of them did not want to mix them together. So I had to find characters who were willing to let me show both sides, or at least show their face and talk about it. So it was, yeah, friends and acquaintances, and I cast some people, and tried to find like a selection that would work for a movie like this.”
Fussenegger further describes his requirements: “Are they able to openly talk about their issues? Do they have a good story? How do they work in front of the camera? Can it be natural? You know, as a documentary, that’s always the question. They need to act like I’m not around. This is quite a challenge. And I have to select those people who are able to deliver that.”
The film is very rude in places (although Fussenegger disputes this) with full-blown erections, oral sex and even a curious “piss-mouth” sequence which Thaur records on camera.
Fussenegger acknowledges that there is some blurring in teh film, but not to mask sexual activity, rather to protect the identities of people who unwittingly find themselves in the film.
KitKatClub – Kinks of Berlin is shot throughout in black and white, which was the suggestion of DoP Dino Osmanović who wanted the film to have an abstract sense. “It’s more like a fairy tale, you know, so we can see [the club] through a different lens as well. It puts away a little bit the realism of this world,” says Fussenegger. “That was kind of the idea behind it, to make it more dreamy, more melancholic. A little bit of separation.”
“And obviously, there are so many different characters and storylines and set-ups, the black and white kind of melts it a little bit better together,” the director adds of the overall sense of tonal unity. “When you go to the club, you should not know everything.”
For Fussenegger, going to the KitKatClub is also a quintessentially Berlin experience, and one that is replicated nowhere else on Earth (although interestingly, there are a number of other such clubs in the German capital, such as Berghain and Insomnia).
“I’ve travelled the world and I’ve looked for it…a place where you can just queue and get inside without having a code or a secret invitation and stuff like that,” he says, at the same time articulating his annoyance for the NY clubs that he feels are more for swingers, and the Parisian venues that he feels seek to “capitalise on people.” The same applies across all major metropolises, he insists, including London and LA.
All the time, at the heart of the film there remains a genuine sense of warmth and affection among its participants, not unlike in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, which lovingly unites a fractured community of participants within the porn trade.
And as in any community, there is bickering, melancholy, laughs and love in Kinks of Berlin, as well as patience, and a desire to be there to offer succour and support when such is needed.
“It’s a family,” Fussenegger insists. “A family of the night.”
