German filmmaker and actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder was BOTD in 1945. Born in Bad Wörishofen, three weeks after Germany’s surrender at the end of World War Two, he was raised by his mother in Munich. He had a turbulent childhood, coming out as bisexual in his early teens, and leaving school at 16. He studied acting at the Fridl-Leonhard Studio and later joined the avant-garde theatre troupe Action-Theatre. Turned down by the Berlin Film School, he formed the Anti-Theater troupe, writing and directing plays which he later adapted into films. An extraordinarily prolific artist, he made 44 films and TV dramas over 25 years, working with low budgets and typically employing the same actors and crew. His films reflected his bleak, nihilistic view of human nature, focusing on the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality and the suffering of women, gays and people of colour in a patriarchal society. He had a major success with 1972’s Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), a Baroque chamber piece chronicling the power struggles within a lesbian relationship. His 1974 film Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) chronicled a clandestine romance between a middle-aged widow and her much younger Moroccan lover (played by Fassbinder’s lover El Hedi ben Salem). Premiering at the Cannes Festival, it was highly praised, significantly boosting his international profile. He wrote, directed and starred in 1975’s Faustrecht der Freiheit (aka Fox and his Friends), a bleak drama about a working-class gay man who wins the lottery, only to be exploited and destroyed by his bourgeois friends. Following the suicide of his lover Armin Meier, he released In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year of 13 Moons), a bleak portrait of a transgender woman revisiting her old haunts before her suicide. He had another major success with 1979’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun), a stirring portrait of a woman surviving at any cost during post-war Germany. His 1980 television adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz was highly praised, and later released as a 16 hour-film. In 1982, he won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale for Veronika Voss, based on the life of the German actress Sybille Schmitz. Messily bisexual, Fassbinder had violently abusive relationships with many of his actresses, including Irm Hermann, Ingrid Caven (to whom he was briefly married) and Juliane Lorenz, while pursuing relationships with married bisexual men including Salem, Meier and Günther Kaufmann. He died of a drug overdose in 1982, aged 37. His final film Querelle, based on Jean Genet’s novel about a horny gay sailor and starring Brad Davis and Jeanne Moreau, and was released after his death. Now considered the one of the 20th century’s most influential artists, his work was hugely influential on New Queer Cinema filmmakers Todd Haynes, Gregg Araki, François Ozon, Derek Jarman and Bruce LaBruce.