The Holy Grill(Extrawurst)
A film by Marcus H. Rosenmüller
One meeting. Too many opinions.
What begins as an ordinary evening at a provincial tennis club quickly becomes anything but ordinary. Around the table, small disagreements turn personal, alliances shift and a seemingly simple decision exposes much larger divisions.
It was supposed to be about a barbecue.
A routine vote at a tennis club turns into an increasingly explosive debate about identity, tolerance and who gets to decide what is reasonable.
At a quiet provincial tennis club, the members gather to vote on a new barbecue for an upcoming club event. Melanie proposes buying a second grill for Erol, the club’s only member of Turkish descent, so that food for Muslim members does not have to be cooked alongside pork.
What begins as a seemingly considerate and practical suggestion quickly spirals out of control. Beliefs, prejudices, personal frustrations and competing ideas of fairness begin to surface, transforming an ordinary club meeting into a sharply comic confrontation in which everyone discovers that the argument is about far more than a grill.
CIVIS Cinema Award 2026 · Filmkunstpreis 2026 — Best Screenplay
How much trouble can one grill cause?
The idea behind The Holy Grill began with an everyday question: how should food be handled when some guests do not eat pork for religious reasons? In real life, the issue was resolved almost immediately. Screenwriters Dietmar Jacobs and Moritz Netenjakob became interested in the opposite possibility—what if nobody could let the subject go? From that small starting point, they built a comedy about the way reasonable conversation can fracture when principles, pride and identity enter the room.
The argument leaves the room.
Extrawurst began as a stage comedy and became one of the most frequently performed contemporary plays in Germany. The original production deliberately traps its characters inside a shared debate, even allowing theatre audiences to vote on the central question at the end.
For the screen adaptation, the filmmakers kept the core conflict but opened the story outward. The tennis hall, clubhouse, workshop, storeroom and surrounding spaces allow the argument to move, gather momentum and reveal more of the characters than the stage version could.
Everyone has a point. Everyone takes it too far.
The comedy works because no character is reduced to a simple position. Each arrives with a worldview, a grievance and a version of what fairness should look like.
Marcus H. Rosenmüller
Character-driven comedy with pace, precision and a sharp eye for social friction.
Marcus H. Rosenmüller is a German filmmaker known for combining broad audience appeal with character-driven comedy and drama. His feature work includes Grave Decisions, The Keeper, Beckenrand Sheriff and Pumuckl and the Big Misunderstanding.
With The Holy Grill, Rosenmüller takes a dialogue-driven stage comedy and expands it into a more physical ensemble film, preserving the verbal precision of the original while allowing the conflict to move through the wider world of the tennis club.
German cinema on the big screen in Calgary.
Join us at the Calgary European Film Festival for The Holy Grill (Extrawurst), a fast-moving ensemble comedy where one ordinary club decision becomes a much larger argument about how people live together.
Sunday, November 8, 2026.
A feature-length comedy-drama.
Presented in German with English subtitles.
Step deeper into the argument.
Meet the members of TC Lengenheide and discover the writers, filmmakers and production team behind the screen adaptation.
Behind the club meeting.
A glimpse behind the scenes of Marcus H. Rosenmüller’s ensemble comedy.
It stopped being about the grill a long time ago.
A comedy about the increasingly difficult art of disagreeing without turning every difference into a battle.
