Lawyers for Armin Meiwes, serving an 8½-year jail sentence for killing and eating a software specialist, have won an injunction against the film, also stopping it being sold as a DVD. The makers may appeal.

Directed by Martin Weisz and starring Thomas Kretschmann as the cannibal, Rohtenburg sticks broadly to the facts. Lawyers found 88 facts in it that correspond to Meiwes’s life. “Even if a criminal has committed an unimaginable act he still has a right to privacy that outweighs the right to free artistic expression,” Judge Bodo Nordmeier said.

Meiwes’s lawyers, who say that the legal actions are to emphasise that his victim was willing, are also seeking a ban on Your Heart In My Brain, a film about the case directed by Rosa Von Praunheim.

A retrial of Meiwes is taking place in Frankfurt, with the state prosecutor trying to prove he was a murderer and that his sentence should be increased.