Fassbinder was born in 1946 to a bourgeois family in Munich.  He was involved in Munich’s avant-garde Antitheater movement, before turning to film-making in the late 1960s.

He directed over forty films in his short life time, among them Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Third Generation and Querelle.

Fassbinder received raves from critics and cineastes alike for the stark realism of his films and for the social commentary prevalent in a good portion of his artistic output. Many of his films also dealt with issues of homosexuality, often reflecting on the nature of human sexuality in general.

He died in 1982 of a drug overdose.  He was 37.