Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven

One of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most provocative (the Berlin Film Festival banned it) variations on the Sirkian melodrama takes subversive, darkly comic aim at the media, politics (both right and left), and family. After her factory-worker husband kills his boss and himself in reaction to a round of layoffs, working-class housewife Emma Küsters (Brigitte Mira) finds herself the unwitting center of a media firestorm while both members of the German Communist party and then a group of anarchists attempt to use her as a symbol of their cause. As always, Fassbinder concerns himself with the dynamics of power and exploitation to paint a damning portrait of a corrupt and alienated society.