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It's a film about brutality. What else would one make a movie about? – Jeff in Beware of a Holy Whore

Only months after shooting Whity, Fassbinder made Beware of a Holy Whore, a satire exploring the simmering tensions between the cast and crew of a stalled film production. Holed up in a Spanish resort, the group play out a series of psychosexual games while awaiting the arrival of their abusive, egomaniacal director. A thinly fictionalised account of the on-set tyranny and dysfunction during the production of Whity, Beware of a Holy Whore is both a scathing self-portrait and a farcical metafilm, with some actors playing themselves (Hanna Schygulla, Alphaville's Eddie Constantine) and others functioning as stand-ins (Magdalena Montezuma in a red wig as Irm Hermann, Lou Castel as the leather-jacketed Fassbinder figure). For Fassbinder, Beware of a Holy Whore was a personal and technical breakthrough and marked the end of his avant-garde period. "With that film, we buried the Antitheatre, which was our first dream," he said. He would later come to consider it his best picture.

M | Coarse language, nudity and sexual references