Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was BOTD in 1898. Born in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire), he grew up in St Petersburg, studying architecture and engineering before joining the Red Army in the Russian Revolution. He moved to Moscow in 1920, working in experimental theatre and publishing articles on aesthetic theory. His first film, Strike, a stirring piece of Communist propaganda, was followed by the war epic Battleship Potemkin, which became an international success. Hailed for its innovative use of editing, camera angles, close-ups and montage, it is now considered one of the greatest films of all time. Eisenstein followed his success with Ten Days That Shook the World and The General Line, which were also successful, though he was criticised by Russian authorities for not adhering to socialist realist aesthetics. He left Russia in 1928, travelling through Europe before he was lured to Hollywood to make a film, a project that proved unsuccessful. In 1930 he travelled to Mexico, meeting Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and spent months filming an epic on Mexican cultural history, speculatively titled Que Viva Mexico! Short of funds, he failed to finish the film and returned to Russia, where he was assigned a teaching position at the State Institute of Cinematography. Attempting to ingratiate himself with Stalin, he filmed two Soviet-friendly epics Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, which reformed his public reputation. Eisenstein’s sexuality has been extensively debated by biographers, notably his close friendship with fellow filmmaker Grigori Aleksandrov, who may have been his lover. He married Pera Atasheva in 1934, partially to protect himself from accusations of homosexuality, which had recently become a criminal offence in the Soviet Union. He died in 1948, aged 50. Now considered one of the major filmmakers of the 20th century, his life has been frequently dramatised, notably Peter Greenaway’s 2015 film Eisenstein in Guanajuato, starring Elmer Bäck as a ravenously gay Eisenstein.