Sailor Querelle arrives to the coastal town Brest in southern France, and starts to repeatedly visit an odd bordello. The owner, Lysistrate, provides an unusual kind of gambling, that lets the winner make love to her – while the loser instead gets to make love with her husband. Meanwhile, Querelle discovers that his own brother is Lysistrate’s lover, and he himself always lose the dice games on purpose… German avant-garde director Rainer Werner Fassbinder has been awarded at most of the significant film festivals internationally, and Querelle was nominated for maybe the finest prize of them all; the Golden Lion in Venice, where legendary director Marcel Carné withdrew from his duty as President of the Jury following his disappointment in the fact that Querelle did not get picked as a winner.